[PD] translate the Start Here! page

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jan 5, 2013, at 6:22 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> 
>> From: Ed Kelly <morph_2016 at yahoo.co.uk>
>> To: Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com>; Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at>
>> Cc: Pd List <pd-list at iem.at>
>> Sent: Saturday, January 5, 2013 5:18 PM
>> Subject: Re: [PD] translate the Start Here! page
>> 
>> OK, no need to fight. This is about a version of Pd-extended that has been a 
>> very long time coming, that had many issues to resolve, that went offline and 
>> was unavailable at the start of the workshops I teach. I also can't get my 
>> students to download a version of Pd-extended that isn't finished and 
>> won't run on their machine. This is their first experience of programming. 
>> They'll give up straight away!
> 
> Of course.  I'm just giving you a beginner's perspective;  it's my own
> memory of that perspective that drives me to work on tools which are currently
> only marginally useful to me personally.  The supermajority of discontent
> among your students tells me that this perspective hasn't changed much.
> By far, that is currently the fault of the software-- the documentation is
> currently too slim and core pd building blocks (and interface) too crude
> for the question "how do I find more objects" to be anything like an ancillary
> question.
> 
> A static out-of-date list is better than nothing, but as far as potential dev
> energy I'd really rather see that put into core docs like the ones listed
> on the bug tracker, which are extremely lacking.  That FLOSS list will hopefully
> become obsolete, but the help docs won't-- even if they're dropped from
> Pd-extended they're still publicly available.
> 
> -Jonathan

While I have agreed and disagreed with various points in this discussion, I think Jonathan's two paragraphs above sum up my feelings on this topic too.  Jonathan has put together a really great system for help from the meta data to the search plugin, now we need to put actual content and meta data in our help patches and it'll all be findable in a multitude of ways.  All this could even be used to generate the static listing in the FLOSS manuals: just take the object name, then get the library and description from the [pd META].

.hc