On 1/11/2015 2:44 AM, Neil Griffin wrote:
I would strongly argue that one thing that is definitely not TW's
strength is user friendliness.. I don't think it ever will be its
selling point, and trying maximise user friendliness is likely to be a
misplaced effort, and could end up diluting TW's strong points. For
someone who needs user friendly note taking, something like Evernote,
OneNote, a Word document or pen and paper are always going to win
out. I would suggest that the features that cause anyone to choose TW
are A) the ability to have ownership of the data and the means to
access that data, and B) the ability to use a powerful, customisable
and extensible platform to organise information in new and interesting
/ useful ways. Personally, I came to TW for A, and stick with it for
both A and B.
I would agree with both. And I also came for A. Especially when ran
under node, so that all the tiddlers end up being separate files that
are very similar in format to other systems like Pelican; that is,
somewhat YAML-like key-value pairs followed by wikitext or Markdown or
whatever. I know that I can "get my content out" of TW if I decide to
change with some pretty simple tools (Ah, if only Pandoc supported TW
syntax! The other wiki formats it supports are all different from TW and
each other - but it would be easy enough to script some transforms, or
for that matter perhaps write a Pandoc reader for TW.)
If we accept these as the key strengths of TW (are there other
suggestions?), then we have to acknowledge that the key audience is
those people who care about those things, and not the people who can
find other tools to do the same job in a more user friendly way. That
doesn't mean that TW shouldn't be made more user friendly, just that
it should primarily be made more friendly to those users, and not to
everyone.
Other strengths:
1. It's actively developed and supported and the primary developer is
accessible. :)
2. It has a great community that is both enthusiastic and open to newcomers.
[I know when making suggestions that the suggester should be willing to
help, and I am, so the following isn't a complaint, just an honest
discussion, including me thinking about where I can contribute to it as
I type.]
That said, I do support Jeremy's efforts to improve the docs. As a
relative newcomer (I had played with TWc some years ago, but came back
to TW5 in seriousness in November), I have to admit I have had some
ramp-up problems getting it all in my head from a
customization/development side. Lots to read (including the code, and
there's */lots /*of code). And even the main TW docs still have some
glaring holes. For example, both the /Variables in WikiText
<http://tiddlywiki.com/#Variables%20in%20WikiText>///and the
/Transclusion in WikiText
<http://tiddlywiki.com/#Transclusion%20in%20WikiText>///tiddlers on the
main site mention a tiddler called /Confusion between Transclusion and
Substitution/ that doesn't exist. And I think it would be handy if it
did, because I am still not clear on that subject myself. I */think /*I
know, but I would like to hear Jeremy's canonical stance. :)
Another issue is lacking a clear, documented understanding of order of
execution - from a high level when rendering a given tiddler, what
happens when in terms of widgets, macros, transclusions (and templates),
substitutions? I remain unclear in this area, and it has cost me time
even doing something "relatively simple" like my bookmarks TW
<https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/pzgn3bukhi6yx4d/bookmarks.html>,
which only has one tiddler that "does anything," but that took me well
over a week to figure out and I experienced a few red screens of death
along the way that rendered the TW file unusable due to autosave (and
yes, I've learned to keep backups :).
In fact, I would like to see more documentation on what I believe the
core of TW is, which is a DSL
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language> for storing and
displaying data within a browser. I think having a "cookbook" of various
"recipes" would be good. There is some of that on the main site, but it
is intermixed with with beginner through advanced topics, with some more
of it over on the dev site (depending on what you're trying to cook :).
In fact, to me part of a cookbook (cookbook.tiddlywiki.com?) would be
different TW files available for downloading demonstrating each recipe.
I know people have discussed this before and some are trying to
accomplish just that, and there are lots of examples linked to from this
group and the site, but I am thinking of a TW "app store," almost. A set
of small, */single-focus/*, curated TWs available for use and more
importantly, as a starting point to observe how something was done.
Right now on the main site there are five examples under Community. I
would think there could be dozens, really. And not so general-purpose as
the examples (not that they're bad!), but more focused, like a TW that
is just "How to use buttons and select widgets." Basically "Empty.html"
with a few things added in each case to demonstrate the point at hand
that can be downloaded, inspected, played around with and nuked when
you've "got it."
Finally, something I am working on now is setting up a better Docker
environment for TW plugin dev. Having done a couple of plugins (both of
which still need work), I think it would be extremely helpful to have a
starting point with a big red arrow pointing to "Start here" and almost
an ordered set of tiddlers of the steps to do and how to test (as Jeremy
knows something that hung me up was the difference between developing
plugins and testing them, especially under node and especially the
difference between where plugins are located in the TW source tree
during dev vs. where they're located in a generated TW).
I think that's enough. :) I just wanted to type it out while it is fresh
in my mind and I am still a newbie with just a couple of months of
effort at customizing TW under my belt, so some of the pain points are
still fresh. This group is very helpful and I appreciate that (truly),
but even so, sometimes when receiving the answer from an "old-timer," I
feel like I am trying to understand this
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXw7LYWNi5E>. :)
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