--- On Mon, 12/6/10, Lorenzo Sutton lsutton@libero.it wrote:
From: Lorenzo Sutton lsutton@libero.it Subject: Re: [PD] Tip of the Day To: Cc: "Jonathan Wilkes" jancsika@yahoo.com, pd-list@iem.at Date: Monday, December 6, 2010, 10:42 AM -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [PD] Tip of the Day From: Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com To: pd-list@iem.at, Lorenzo Sutton lsutton@libero.it Date: 06/12/10 10:26
--- On Mon, 12/6/10, Lorenzo Suttonlsutton@libero.it
wrote:
From: Lorenzo Suttonlsutton@libero.it Subject: Re: [PD] Tip of the Day To: pd-list@iem.at Date: Monday, December 6, 2010, 9:28 AM Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
Hi, What do
people think of
the little "Tip of the Day" windows that
are in some software? Are they helpful?
Annoying? My two cents. I think they are pretty useless and annoying, as
randomly
suggesting something doesn't add any help to the
total
beginner ("did you know you can type ctrl+1 to
create a new
object?"... well thank you but I'd really like to
know how
to make those cool sounds in pd like the
videos I saw
on youtube!)
But I guess it's a matter of personal taste.
Maybe, though, some of those "tips" could go in
some sort
of Pd quick tutorial or cookbook... but searchable
and well
indexed?
I was trying to focus on matters of edition and odds
and ends that
are easy to overlook in such tutorials. Every
one of the tips is
covered somewhere in Pd's help docs, but they're all
scattered
about.
As for searchable and well-indexed-- that's the idea
of the META
subpatch, which I've added to all the internal help
patches as well
as many external help patches, too. Not too long
ago I posted a
screenshot of a search patch I made that dynamically
generates
results in the form of link + object
description. I've done the
same for Miller's tutorials but I have no idea whether
he'll include
them or not.
IMHO *that* is a very good idea.. searching for some library/external one doesn't always use and can't remember the exact name (including upper-lowecase mixes) can be a headache and often ends up with clumsy and not-so efficient find . -iname something in the /usr/lib/pd-extended dir :)
I can't recall if there was some discussion on the list about help files "best practices", ideally there should always be a comment or the object itself with a brief (meaningful) description like:
[osc~] - cosine wave oscillator
That would be: DESCRIPTION cosine wave oscillator
So in my search patch you can type "oscillator" and get a match.
You can also search for particular keys/values:
"@AUTHOR Miller Puckette"
returns all (well, most) of the internal objects, and
"@INLET_0 symbol @OUTLET_0 symbol"
gives you makefilename, openpanel, iemlib/splitfilename,
iemlib/stripfilename, etc.
Unfortunately there are A LOT of externals that have stop-gap help files without any descriptions (or even example patches).
-Jonathan
This way one could easily index externals and abstractions...
abstractions are types of external-- at least I treat them the same by assuming they should all have their own help patches. (Although they do get tagged with the keyword "abstraction" so one could narrow a search that way.)
I had hacked a python script to create a single html page of an extrernals dir a while back but it was pretty crude.
Lorenzo