-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [PD] Tip of the Day
From: Jonathan Wilkes <[email protected]>
To: [email protected], Lorenzo Sutton <[email protected]>
Date: 06/12/10 10:26
--- On Mon, 12/6/10, Lorenzo Sutton<[email protected]> wrote:
From: Lorenzo Sutton<[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [PD] Tip of the Day
To: [email protected]
Date: Monday, December 6, 2010, 9:28 AM
Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
Hi,
What do people think of
the little "Tip of the Day" windows that
are in some software? Are they helpful?
Annoying?
My two cents.
I think they are pretty useless and annoying, as randomly
suggesting something doesn't add any help to the total
beginner ("did you know you can type ctrl+1 to create a new
object?"... well thank you but I'd really like to know how
to make those cool sounds in pd like the videos I saw
on youtube!)
But I guess it's a matter of personal taste.
Maybe, though, some of those "tips" could go in some sort
of Pd quick tutorial or cookbook... but searchable and well
indexed?
I was trying to focus on matters of edition and odds and ends that
are easy to overlook in such tutorials. Every one of the tips is
covered somewhere in Pd's help docs, but they're all scattered
about.
As for searchable and well-indexed-- that's the idea of the META
subpatch, which I've added to all the internal help patches as well
as many external help patches, too. Not too long ago I posted a
screenshot of a search patch I made that dynamically generates
results in the form of link + object description. I've done the
same for Miller's tutorials but I have no idea whether he'll include
them or not.
IMHO *that* is a very good idea.. searching for some library/external
one doesn't always use and can't remember the exact name (including
upper-lowecase mixes) can be a headache and often ends up with clumsy
and not-so efficient find . -iname something in the
/usr/lib/pd-extended dir :)
I can't recall if there was some discussion on the list about help files
"best practices", ideally there should always be a comment or the object
itself with a brief (meaningful) description like:
[osc~] - cosine wave oscillator
This way one could easily index externals and abstractions... I had
hacked a python script to create a single html page of an extrernals dir
a while back but it was pretty crude.
Lorenzo
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