wiredfool

We were looking for answers to the question: what do beginners want?

We had 2 new attendees, one of whom has a DG based website up, the other has played with frontier for about 30 minutes. Of the previously known people, there was me, (SA, but easily distracted), Michael (Very experienced, also easily distracted with neat ideas), Ivy (who has done a couple of frontier websites and is a graphic design/writer who has very little patience when Michael and I go off on a techincal tangent), Lauri (new frontier user but used to instructing about technical systems) and Ken (Intermediate frontier user)

We also touched on the question of how to train designers familiar with marking up each piece of text by hand to create designs that can be built by scripts and templates.

The upshot is that there are several pieces of the puzzle.

• Tutorial of how to navigate the frontier app/odb.
• An overview of what’s already been built and what is availiable w/o major programming.
• Tutorial on programming using Usertalk and programming in general

In all cases save the first, examples and sample sites/packages were considered very useful. Michael and I had a couple of side discussions of the form: I’d really like feature X, it needs to be a sample. Followed by me saying, I was just thinking that this week, I’ve implememnted it/ it’s on the todo list. We were pondering trying to get 10 or so projects that scratch an itch, get some working beta code out there and trying to build a open source community around it. Projects that are things that programmers will use every day so that the fix and extend them. On the list of 10 things, we’ve started to fill out a list of stuff that we really want to see happen. (See “projects”)

• Networked Bookmark List
• Address book or other flat file db functionality using a simple prefs.root
  type interface.
• Filtered news feeds.

Of these, I’ve started the filtered news feeds, to the point of almost having a site live to do it. I also mentioned that I am serving my netscape bookmark file via frontier and a filespec link so that I can get to it from anywhere in my world.

There were a couple of comments about the support associates program.

• It hasn’t been well promoted to the general population at this point.
• Ken liked the fact that there was a phone call interface that happened and showed up on one of the mailing lists. we also pointed out that there is a great value in being able to distill your question down to an email, since it forces you to think through your problem.