[Tb] learning curve to[o] steep

I won't purport to be a Tinderbox power user, but I have worked with
the program enough to have figured out one of the issues that seems to
be a stumbling point for a lot of potential users: Tinderbox *looks*
like a very straightforward, intuitive program. It's not.

That's not a criticism; I don't subscribe to the Ted Nelson/Don Norman
"Computer interfaces must be completely obvious" school of thought. To
my mind, powerful working environments are often very complex, and for
good reasons. Photoshop, as you say, is a good example. Users can do a
handful of very easy things without reading the manual and spending
time experimenting via trial and error. But to go much beyond, say,
creating simple notes and embellishments, one has to (a) work carefully
through the manual, (b) find some current projects that they can take
apart and learn from, and (c) ask questions of the small user
community.

One has to approach it more from a hacker's or programmer's mindset
than a writer's or graphic designer's.

- Johndan

On Feb 24, 2004, at 11:17 AM, Lee Phillips wrote:

> This seems to be a recurring theme, here, on the Wiki, and previously
> on the (defunct) official forum.
>
> I confess I have trouble understanding the kind of roadblock described
> here, as my personal experience was that I was doing real work with
> Tinderbox, using most of it features, within a couple days of
> downloading it. I did have to endure some frustrating moments
> rewriting someof my templates because html export did not work the way
> I assumed it should in some details, and, as the documention was (and
> is) sorely lacking in technical detail, the only way to find out what
> the program actually did was through a process of trial and error.
>
> But I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for the folks at
> Eastgate to be confronted with a constant trickle of would-be users
> who think that Tinderbox might be what they're looking for but is too
> hard to figure out.
>
> I think it would be excellent if those of us who use Tinderbox could
> help the would-be users, but the hard work is up to them: the hard
> work of explaining what they had hoped to do with Tinderbox and why
> they couldn't figure out how to do it. And before that, the apparently
> arduous work of actually reading the manual.
>
> Because, from these messages, I can't figure out where to start in
> trying to help them.
>
> To pick on the current correspondent: would someone who had spent
> significant time with the documentation be likely to refer to a note
> as a "card"? I was a big Hypercard user in the old days, but I never
> had the urge to use this terminology. (No offense intended here; I
> understand that English is not your native language and that that may
> be the reason for this and for your trouble with the manual.)
>
> So, perhaps you can start. What are you trying to accomplish with
> Tinderbox? When you say "but everything above this level [creating a
> note] is a mystery", what are you trying to do? I would say that the
> next level is drawing a line between two notes to indicate a
> relationship. Are you saying that you couldn't figure out, even with
> the manual, how to do this? Why is the manual a pain?
>
> A final note to several people who have complained that they couldn't
> figure out how to use the program effectively without, well, using it
> for a while: isn't this the case for any non-trivial piece of
> software? Do you expect every program to be MacPaint? I've been using
> Photoshop for a couple of years now, and there is still, I would
> estimate, a third of the program's features that I don't really know
> how to use.
>
> Let us help you. Actually tell us what the problem is.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tb mailing list
> Tb__AT__lee-phillips.org
> http://lee-phillips.org/mailman/listinfo/tb_lee-phillips.org
>
Received on Tue Feb 24 11:38:36 2004