Xavier,
I have kept quiet about my opinion of TAOO until now. But with all
the stuff flying around, I figured I could weigh in without being the
center of controversy. I am not a fast typist, so I hope you can
appreciate my efforts at providing some constructive criticism.
Every time you announce a stack or push TAOO as something to look at
again, I go to your website and download what you have and try it
out. I usually find that my attention is diverted from what you are
trying to show, instead to bugs that cause it not not function or
other cosmetic flaws on my OS X system. I get frustrated after about
10 minutes and throw whatever it is in the trash and think that I
will wait until you have it fixed and then look at it. Only problem
is that the story never seems to change.
As an example, I downloaded the Science.rev stack. I noticed that
the buttons were not sized to look their best on my system, so I went
about resizing buttons, changing them to square, adjusting positions
a bit. Then I started looking at the content. Noticed that the
categories were not filled in correctly for some of the entries, so I
edited them. Then I tried to click on the hyperlinks in the text and
noticed that none of them worked. Then I read and enjoyed some of
the science articles. I noted that my DEVONthink Pro program would
have done a much nicer job of doing the small database example in a
polished way. Then I realized that I had spent an hour on this and I
had no idea what I was supposed to learn about TAOO from it. Time to
get back to work...
I am sure that TAOO does something useful for you, but I am not sure
what that is other than a simple free form database in the example.
I am certain that I have no idea what advantage I could put it to for
myself, because I don't understand where it fits in with my needs.
I spent the last 7 months programming with Rev full time on what
seems like a large project to me, though it is only one stack and one
card at 3k lines of script and growing smaller as I write more! I
threw out my design twice as I learned more about the problem I am
trying to solve, and how to write effecient and maintainable code.
During that time I went from "What is the message path?" to
understanding about half of what is in Rev today. When I started
out, I did not even fathom the amount of stuff I did not know about
Rev. This is a simple program from a system point of view. It just
reads in some data files, writes out some reorganized versions of the
files, generates simulations and statistics on the data and generates
tables and complex graphs of the results in an interactive way. When
I need to add a new function to my program now, I spend hours
thinking about the problem I am solving and how it fits into my GUI
and internal framework, from a philosophical and maintainability
point of view, then I spend a few minutes adding it, and then hours
testing it.
The point of this is that I understand what I can and can't do in Rev
now. I have a clear picture in my mind about all the internal parts
and how I can put them together to solve a problem. It took a lot of
time and effort on my part to get to this point. I have also stayed
current with all the posts on this mailing list to help me understand
some of the many dark corners, and I have also received help from the
list posters. I have attended the tutorial conferences which also
provided me with at least one new trick each. Without all these
support tools I would not know half of what I do now about Rev.
Now the question is, how can you create a demo or tutorial that can
transmit that picture that you have in your mind to others. It is
certain that nobody is going to invest months of time trying to
figure out if it is useful. You have to be able to show them its
utility in less than an hour. You have to spoon feed the concepts
painlessly. Nobody wants to fight you for the table scraps.
Perhaps, you could generate a tutorial written TAOO that shows how to
use it to solve a problem that is universal to most programmers and
that you consider to be an area of strength for TAOO. Think about
the wonderful tutorial stacks that others have written to promote
their products or have provided as a service to the community.
If TAOO is worthwhile for others, the time you spend organizing you
thoughts and writing the tutorial example will be repaid ten times
over in the future with praise, collaboration, and improved utility
of TAOO. Also don't forget that a picture is worth a thousand words.
If you can't justify the effort to do this, then don't expect the
future to be any different than the past.
Dennis
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