[PD] Call-for-Help: tips of the day

IOhannes m zmoelnig zmoelnig at iem.at
Wed Jun 8 11:42:35 CEST 2022


TL;DR if you know any quick tips for using Pd, submit them at
   https://github.com/pd-externals/tipoftheday-plugin/issues/new/choose



long version:

as you all know, Pd comes with a built-in documentation, that 
illustrates how to use various objects and stuff (and alex has done a 
fantastic job in revising these patches in the last months).

for a deeper understanding of Pd, there's the HTML manual (which looks 
nice, after lucarda added some CSS).


however, i think that there are a couple of things that need 
documentation which cannot really be covered by either help patches nor 
manuals.
e.g. "intelligent patching" (where i've spent a bit of time to get it 
working) or other workflow tricks do not fit well in either category:
if they are explained in some help-patches then only people who actively 
walk through those patches will ever see them (and i believe most people 
just open the help-patch of a given object they are interested; but what 
would you open for a non-object that you don't even know about).
similarly, i have a feeling that the manual is not the best place for 
this either (first, the manual deals with the "larger picture" rather 
than interface tricks; second, the manual is more of an off-line 
resource (that you may read when not sitting in front of a running 
instance of Pd).

just recently i mentioned the "triggerize" functionality to someone, and 
they never ever heard of it!


to fix this, i've created a small GUI-plugin to display a "tip of the 
day" whenever Pd is started.

i think this (Pd's startup phase) is the right time to learn something 
new (in tiny bits) - after all, other applications (like my trusted MS 
VisualStudio 6) did the same).

the tips are super-simple: just a short text, with an optional URL for 
more information and support for displaying (animated) GIFs (patching is 
oft explained better by showing).


the GUI-plugin is available on
   https://github.com/pd-externals/tipoftheday-plugin/

but there's no release (and thus no deken package) yet.

There's also an experimental webinterface where you can browse the 
existing tips at <https://pd.iem.sh/tipoftheday-plugin/>


so far so good.
The only drawback right now is, that there are only a very few tips 
available yet (a total of *4*, mainly for testing).

so before this is going to be released to the public, I'd like to 
collect a few (hundred) more tips

this is where you come into play:
if you know any quick tips, patching tricks or hacks, please submit them 
in the issue-tracker at 
<https://github.com/pd-externals/tipoftheday-plugin/issues/new/choose>
(the "Tip of the Day" issue-type will give you a form that you should 
fill in; this should keep the entry barrier to creating new tips low).


thanks for helping out.

gmasdr
IOhannes
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