[chuck-users] priorities for next release

[Kassen]

On 8/29/07, Adam Tindale <adamtindale at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi All,


Hi, Adam, good to hear from you again!


I have been silent for a long while. I am always happy to proofread and
> hack stuff into the manual and make the commits (as long as Ge doesn't
> kick me off CVS). Like Ge, I just got a teaching gig and I am a bit
> swamped being new at all this.



Congratulations.

I have pleaded in the past for other people to submit tutorials or find
> mistakes in the manual and pass them on to me and the whole ChucK team.
> It now seems that there are so many experts that this dream is coming
> true. Most of what I did for the manual was to edit the original APIs
> into some semi readable form. A lot of that work was done by Ge and Phil
> and I just merely put it into LaTeX.


You still did a very good job and having a manual at all was a big
improvement. before the manual I had to manually save all usefull web-pages
because I also wanted to ChucK when away from the web.


There have been many people talking on the list about knowing how
> something works and not seeing it in the manual. If you do know and it
> isn't there, just write something up and tell me where you would like it
> be. The hardest part for me is starting something. If you get it started
> then the rest isn't so bad.
>
> I haven't worked on the manual in a long time and I am seeing that it is
> badly out of date. I will do my best to devote some time to it in the
> coming months (I am hoping to teach ChucK, so a good manual helps me too).
>
> If you have something you would like added to the official docs please
> send it along to me directly or via the list and I will be happy to add
> it.


I believe the last larger update was by Spencer. Generally I think
centralising the notes about the manual would be a good idea. This would
create a spot that would be the first to look if something seems missing, we
could colaborate on documenting exactly what is missing or wrong and it
would make it easier for different people to work on it. Basically I think
the WiKi is perfect for this. However, I have some problems with how the
WiKi works. I've been adding notes on the manual and bugs that I found or
that new users on the forum ran into there and many of those got solved but
once they do they stay on the WiKi.

It's my opinion that things would get much clearer, clearer and more usable
if we'd delete solved issues from there or at least move them to a "solved
issues" section. Right now it's usable to the in-crowd of ChucK users but
probably hard to decypher for new users and I shudder to think what the
"bugs" page looks like to somebody considdering to jump in, there's a
frightfull amount of terrible bugs there, nearly all of which have been long
solved. If we keep the current policies up I imagine it will be completely
unusable to anyone in a year or two.

I've pointed this out before and also pointed out that I would be happy to
clean this a little but I'm not going to delete/move that much stuff without
a official go-ahead, I'm still a guest there, I feel, and guests shouldn't
start throwing out the trash without some discussion.

Anyway, I would be happy to have a look at what areas are seen as the most
urgent by new users (MIDI always leads to questions, in my experience) and
try to do a section on some of those.

Another, much lager, matter is that it seems that some people expect that
it's a good idea to start ChucKing by reading the manual front to cover. Now
we have a lot of experts on teaching here that know a lot more then I do but
to me that doesn't sound like a particularly practical idea or that
ChucKian. perhaps most usfull would be a good "how to read this manual/ what
would be a good place to start/ introduction" section, preferably on the
topic of creating a little techno while having fun and not on how to create
a sinewawave after a week of deep meditation on cpu architecture

Kas.
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