[Tb] learning curve to[o] steep

I'm going to rearrange your message and quote you out of order.

on 2/24/04 10:17 AM, Lee Phillips at lee__AT__lee-phillips.org wrote:

> 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.

Everything in Photoshop has a non-digital equivalent. I understand most of
these because I used to work in advertising and printing. I think this is
true for most software we use - there's a "real world" task that the program
handles digitally.

I'm not clear on what the "real world" version of Tinderbox would be. A
notebook? A filing cabinet? I got that part of Tinderbox figured out pretty
quickly, but there are thousands of programs that handle that, but don't do
the nifty things that Tinderbox can.

> <snip> the only way to
> find out what the program actually did was through a process of trial and
> error.

What does the program do?

I think lots of people (certain I'm one) looked at this and said "How cool!
This could be great for this half-baked idea I've been working on, maybe now
I can bet somewhere!" I'm wondering if what it is and can do is not well
enough defined.

> 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 this is where to split to two themes. One is "it's just too hard"
which I suspect may be related to my comments above.

The other is "it's harder than other options, so I may lose features that
might be neat but the task is done and I can move on."

> So, perhaps you can start. What are you trying to accomplish with Tinderbox?

I think this is a very important question.

> And before that, the apparently arduous work of actually reading the
> manual.

I started by playing with it, and took a couple trips through the tutorial.
It appears to be about making notes for a novel, and putting notes inside
notes. Well, I figured out that much myself, and I'm not a fiction writer
(at least not on purpose), so the tutorial was really a confusing waste of
time. Perhaps Eastgate could come up with a better tutorial (or several
levels of tutorials).

After these discussions I went back, took another look at the manual and
downloaded all the sample templates I could find. The templates were more
helpful than the manual. Once I saw some of that I was better able to use
the manual for syntax reference.

I'd previously said I wasn't interested in blogs or managing web pages.
After some careful thought I decided to change my mind on that. I started
out by porting a pretty simple web page to Tinderbox. It's now three times
the work, and not everything works yet, but it's a good learning project
that's getting me into using agents and beyond.

The other thing was I realized that if I squinted hard enough I could make
my photo project look a bit like a blog on the creation/management side of
it, so I'm working through some of the blog templates.

-Carl
Received on Tue Feb 24 12:50:08 2004