Frank Barknecht wrote:
- The "categories" like "midi, network", "storage" seem arbitrary (like all categories do). Maybe use the categories of help-intro?
yes, categories are arbitrary :-)
but that menu is a bit different.
first it uses tags.
it builds the top level categories by partitioning the object_db by most popular tags (the most popular tags are found thru a datamining application[1]).
so, the first level it's a proper category.
the second level (and further levels, if any) shows you a search "view" by that tag, so you can find an object in multiple second level categories. again, which tags to show is decided thru datamining.
I choose to did that because looking into menus could be frustrating. if accidentally you start searching in the wrong branch of menu, you never find the object you are looking for. however I eliminated dups on the first level, because too many dups were proliferating in the menu.
so you should start looking in the right category, then you have many chances to find the object you want.
anyway, the structure is hardcoded, and currently is: { connectivity {osc midi network} conversion {midi audio} cyclone {hammer sickle audio math control} zexy {audio analysis matrix control} maxlib {control time math glue} audio {abstraction conversion fftease cyclone math logical analysis filters delay effects tables} vasp {declaration arithmetic basics functions generators transcendent minmax utilities filters fft displace} storage {abstraction lists matrix tables} pdmtl {control convert list edit flow imaging} imaging {{gem particles} {gem manipulators} {gem pixes} {gem geos} {gem opengl} {pdp image} {pdp processing} {pdp abstraction} {pdp 3d} pidip manipulators wrapper particles automata processing} }
ideas on how to improve it are very welcome ;)
[1]: this datamining application allows also to add/remove tags. I'd like to share it with others, so others can contribute to tagging. I'm looking for someone that can host a php+mysql webapp. it's very tiny: only 14.8 k of code, including two images, and a database consisting of one table (occupies 656k on disk with 2685 objects in it)