We have no less than 4 programmers in our office and if you asked any of us to program something in xojo, there would probably be 4 different examples of how to program it and they would all work.
However, what we typically do is after any of us do something, we have a roundtable and nitpick the solution to make sure we didn’t forget something. We don’t change the programming, just the end result.
I guess what I’m saying is why not create a website of suggested solutions that people want to see and then ask 3 or 4 people to create an example of how to do it. Perhaps only one would create the solution but the other 2 or 3 would offer suggestions on how to make it better, more efficient, more flexible.
Programmers tend to be very independent thinkers, but don’t always think of all the possibilities the first time through. We have solutions (within finished applications) that have gone through 15 iterations before we satisfied all the user’s needs. I’ve never written a piece of code that on reflection couldn’t have been written better or more efficiently.
There are trade-offs to whatever you choose to do, but I’d be happy to offer my experience in whatever you feel is most appropriate. I think the key is do just do something, because there are a lot of things that I learned the hard way (trial and error) that I know I could help some new users with.
My company writes commercial software, not specifically for one client, we our perspective may be very different from those who do contract work. We recently went through a MAJOR update which moved our application from Visual Foxpro to RB and that means not just a complete re-write of our application, but a very sophisticated conversion from DBF’s to Sqlite. Affected more than 20,000+ users so we spent 3 years prepping for it.
John,
that is exactly what I was proposing in my offer of a pdf.
A few people contribute.
I make the pdf.
I provide the pdf to the novice community.
Occasionally - the contributors view the pdf, and advise me of any changes required / recommended.
I update the pdf and inform the novices.
Occasionally - the novices simply need to delete the pdf and download the new one.
Simple???
If I can work out how to get the info in the first place - then I will do it.
If novices think it is a good idea - they can download it.
If they think it is a bad idea - then they don’t.
PDFs in my opinion would be a poor decision. It’s something to download, it takes time to read through them, and they’re more often than not presented poorly. I read the manual books as ibooks on my ipad because of how much I find pdfs to be annoying.
I’m more akin to a controlled wiki. The xojo docs have worked well for me so far.
[quote=85114:@Dave S]But correct me if I am wrong here Thom… but you sound like you are talking a commerical (paid) endeavor?
If so, that is NOT what I am advocating… I am looking at a FREE situation.
Yes it would have to be monitored… kept clean etc…
And I am not imagining a site that would host code (other that code contained as snippets within a larger white paper)[/quote]
No, I’m not sure where the “paid solution” thought came from. I have no intention of charging money for anything on it. External resources would be a different story of course, for example if Christian were to list the MBS plugins, those are of course paid and I’d have no objection to that. But to charge people to post a listing, or for reading a tutorial… absolutely not.
It’s not exactly a collection of white papers, and it is commercial, but over the years xDev Magazine (www.xdevmag.com/browse/) has published many articles that sound like exactly what you’re wanting.
(I’m certain not anti-free solutions, but they always seem to die off. People get excited about a new free project for a little while, then reality sets in, and the idea withers. That’s one of the reasons I made the magazine a business. I wanted something that would last.)
[quote=85186:@Marc Zeedar]It’s not exactly a collection of white papers, and it is commercial, but over the years xDev Magazine (www.xdevmag.com/browse/) has published many articles that sound like exactly what you’re wanting.
(I’m certain not anti-free solutions, but they always seem to die off. People get excited about a new free project for a little while, then reality sets in, and the idea withers. That’s one of the reasons I made the magazine a business. I wanted something that would last.)[/quote]
Yeah, I’ve seen plenty come and go, and even ran one of them myself for a while. That’s why I’m trying to take my time to get a rock-solid concept together first. I’d rather announce nothing than another site likely to fail.
These sites and ideas pop up because there is a need, there is a gap that needs filling.
PDF: There’s nothing against PDF PER SE, it’s just that it’s used as a permanence thing. You know! Someone is going to have an outdated PDF, try what it says, and it doesn’t work. YOU KNOW that will happen.
The good thing about a web page - wiki, HTML, whatever - is that there is only ONE authoritative channel. THAT page. TODAY.
One more thing: I’m not a fan of blogs - where you have a person doing an article, and then a bunch of unmanaged people discussing it. TOO CONFUSING. Anyone can say anything. You get people correcting the author and those corrections wind up being not legit. Too Much Information (Sting, Police, Ghost In The Machine, circa 1981)
What makes a SOLUTION particular is that the author has AUTHORITY. The point of having a infinitely up-datable document is that the author is free to add nuances or corrections to his solution, but in a way that keeps it authoritative. I don’t care who corrected this or that. I don’t care about alternate solutions - unless the author sees that as legit and he writes it in so it’s clear and concise and not confusing.
I think the original suggestion was about topics that really only had one answer, and two or three slight variants at the most. I liked Dave’s original list.
Forget the pdf idea then - it was just an idea I had in order to give something back to the community.
It will be interesting to see what eventually transpires.
What the community needs is FOCUS. The last thing it needs is another splinter site. And the information, in order to be authoritative, needs to be curated. One downside to the forums is that there is too much misinformation. A wiki would be slightly better, but it still needs to be moderated by a group of people who are qualified to keep it accurate.
I think an organization like the ARBP would be a good place for this kind of information. People could submit their white paper for review and they would be published to the site. I’d be willing to serve on an advisory board for something like this.
It would also be helpful if there were some tie-in with Xojo Inc. Maybe Paul could be a liaison, since this falls in the realm of documentation.
I wish more users would become active at xojodevspot.com. weve archived every known realbasic/xojo source in a custom search engine, implemented a code library with the largest available library and snippet base to date, tutorials section, have a xojo code store (post your code and get paid for it when a customer buys it…which is the only ‘paid’ portion of the site…) and some other “behind closed doors” items to come to light. Each account comes with a blog system and if anyone would like to join the admins in expanding the site, that would be awesome. Its free to access everything but sold code and we need some minor site maintainance and more activity to help developers along their journey. I’m open to any ideas and anyone wishing to add to making developer’s lives easier… plus keeping a “centralized” location for everything to be found. We have 700 active xojo members and 9-10,000 unique ip hits a week and downloads from “guest” users. Anyone interested in being an admin or expanding the site is free to message me.
[quote=85208:@Tim Hare]What the community needs is FOCUS. The last thing it needs is another splinter site. And the information, in order to be authoritative, needs to be curated. One downside to the forums is that there is too much misinformation. A wiki would be slightly better, but it still needs to be moderated by a group of people who are qualified to keep it accurate.
It would also be helpful if there were some tie-in with Xojo Inc. Maybe Paul could be a liaison, since this falls in the realm of documentation.[/quote]
In general, I really love the idea of having a library of examples and deeper explanations on some more advanced features right at hand. In fact, I proposed a slightly similar thing some time ago.
While I understand the urge to go for an optimum with regards to usability (and therefore, although being busy in design in normal life would not like to have a PDF which is more difficult to search and handle than a Wiki), I personally would rather like to extend the existent. I dont know about your preferred style of coding and have often learned I shouldnt declare myself as standard. But maybe its not so exotic:
I usually have Xojo running on one monitor and keep its language reference open on the other one. Makes it very easy to look up a reference on some Xojo term. While it may not be perfect, I like the speed and cross references it delivers. Especially when compared to the Apple Developer Docs. They look much nicer, but I always find myself scrolling through endless html files jumping back and forth to look up a property, go back to the index, look up another This takes much longer. And I have to change to my browser in order to look something up, which is why I wouldnt want another whatsoever app window open after all, I still dont own a 4K display.
The Xojo Wiki on the other hand has categories which should be easily extendable. I could imagine asking Xojo for the addition of a “User library” sub-entry to the documentation where users could contribute their explanations and examples. When the editorial board (to which I agree) has approved one, making it visible to very user inside the user lib category, we could even address Xojo with the wish of adding a link from a relevant official Language Reference entry to this article. And I would not vote against links to commercial solutions in the addendum of such an article.
Today I wanted to generate a random, web safe 32 character string. On the Tcl wiki there are 6 implementations (just hit the search toolbar and say random string). I then did a google for random string Xojo and after browsing a few hits, I found an old forum post with four different solutions.
How nice it would be for all sorts of things, as well as more lengthy how to articles, to be in a wiki. That’s what I was envisioning when I saw this post initially.
However, is someone going to write a white paper and submit it for a 2-3 line long code snippet? Will others chime in and give their interpretation on how it should be done?
BTW… All of which I was able to speed up using common techniques… if on a wiki, I would have added to the end of the page my newest version, which someone would probably find a faster way of doing it yet. In the end everyone would have a great random string method.
Kind of. The real benefit I’ve seen on the Tcl wiki is with each new iteration, people will explain why they did what they did. You’d be amazed at how much you can learn about programming via that. Further, a Xippet, I would presume, would have a single author and wouldn’t have follow up Xippets? Some of which would be better at generating random hashes while others random strings throughout the whole UTF8 spectrum.
Oh, also one excelled at creating a random string, but no regards to special characters. So it may generate 93*&djsd$#2S3 while another would just use A-Za-z0-9. Yet others allowed you to specify the characters to pull from. i.e. All generate random strings, but all three do different things.
I am currently working on Xippets desktop which you can use for your own snippets, stored locally, 1 click publish and they will be on the Xippets site and sync so all other Xippets on the server are synced to your local repository. Early days and a lot of hard work but I am happy to take on board any ideas or feature requests people may have. In the meantime please keep using the Xippets website because the database will be ported across for use in Xippets Desktop.
