Re: barn-raising suggestions...
Posted by: Bowerbird <Bowerbird@...>
teppo said:
> The graphically skilled of this list could design some banners
> we all could put to the splash windows of
> our little non-killer applications.
> This would be quicker and easier than a whole multimedia presentation.
i've already written a couple multi-media authoring tools, so it will be
very "quick and easy" for me to do the multi-media presentation part.
if the people who want to participate will send me a short bio/whatever
and a graphic (of you, your grandchild, your pet, or whatever you want),
i'll be responsible for creating the multi-media presentation component.
(get it to me by monday and the presentation will be done by wednesday.)
wilcox said:
> But, whatever we do (and count me in for something),
> it _should_ support all the latest Apple technologies
> such as AppleScript, AppleGuild, ColorSync (if it's a painting program),
> Drag Manager, and as M Goodes mentioned, Speech Recognition.
are you volunteering to provide the functions which enable these things?
if so, great!
mike said:
> my motto has always been "a jack of all trades is a master of none."
sure, except nobody's being asked to be "a jack of all trades" here.
in fact, it's the exact _opposite_ -- people are being asked to
_specialize_ by providing _already-written-and_well-working_ functions.
...and...
> Modularizing a huge assortment of tools would
> inherently make them weaker, insecure, and unstable.
why?
a function that works well inside a program of its own
will work just as well inside a program with other functions.
...and...
> I think a better approach would be to have several small apps
> devoted to certain tasks, perhaps bound by a master app,
> sort of like Norton Utils.
but then every one of these "several small apps" has to
duplicate the overhead of the runtime environment,
for no good purpose (at least none that i can discern).
put speech recognition in a file-renaming program,
and you'll end up with a huge file-renaming program.
if that's all it does, nobody's gonna download it, or use it daily.
the whole purpose of a barn-raising is to combine efforts,
to produce something that is substantial and useful
more quickly as a group than any of us could individually.
if we're all going to produce our own small app,
there's no need to coordinate our efforts at all.
(plus then we lose all the benefits of synergy.)
more importantly, i just think that 50 little sheds
are going to fail to be as impressive as 1 barn.
kiyo said:
> Utility to do file management (rename, delete, move.....),
> there is a program called 'FilterTop',
> it looks like quite a program,
> check at the web < http://www.topsoft.org >
> and find Project/FilterTop.
kiyo, it sounds like you don't actually use filtertop.
i looked at it very briefly (without reading the docs),
but there were no good examples to work from
and it just didn't seem intuitive enough to me,
although i suppose that's an individual matter.
(i think a program called "deskzap" is much better.
and a program called "substitute" also has a good u.i.)
filtertop _was_ written by a group of far-flung programmers,
so it's similar to what we've been talking about doing here.
(and, somewhat scarily, it appears to have taken them _years_
to get out their still-not-intuitive-enough-for-me product.)
-bowerbird