Talk

psonice's picture
Yay!

How will it be structured? I'm happy to fill in a few bits i know about, but I've no idea where to start :)

marcel_achard's picture
how to and basic help with Kineme3D

I also feel some confusion about your tools. Vimeo speed tutorials are somewhat nice but details are hard to read and follow. I think you would greatly help your cause and users with a few simple examples and basic setups bundled with Kineme3D. When you buy|use a new product you don't want to wander through a wiki or forums. Best regards and thanks for some great tools! M.A

cwright's picture
kineme3d samples

In the DMG there are numerous sample compositions that show the basics of how things work, hopefully satisfying the "few simple examples and basic setups" and "bundled with Kineme3D" requirements simultaneously.

Did you perhaps have something else in mind?

tobyspark's picture
being slightly cheeky

...you've just added to the confusion of kineme 1.0; now there's an extra channel for content to go, and there's no effort at differentiating one from the other or structuring what should go here.

i'm not against wikis, i think kineme 2.0 should have one associated with the patches, i'm just a bit confused by this move.

tobyspark's picture
ha... and i've just realised

that my rant about structuring the site and the way that drupal sites often encourage somehow this kind of splatter gun content didn't actually get posted as my mbp froze (wtf!) and it got lost in the sea of things i had to get back to.

psonice's picture
Wiki for main info source?

I'd kind of assumed the wiki would be just a collection of info on QC and the kineme patches. I.e. how to use QC, how to install plugins, what each plugin does and how to use it. There would need to be links to the discussion + original download pages though.

But yeah, thinking about it, we've now got a lot of duplicate pages, which is less than ideal. Some guidance from above on how the site is going to be structured would be good :)

cwright's picture
Totally confusing :)

This move (plus associated confusion) is actually intentional:

To ruin the science, I wanted to see what self-emerged, and then use some of that structure to restructure kineme 2.0. I've got my personal opinions as to how it should be structured, but it's been made clear more than a few times that I, as a programmer, think and organize very differently from non-programmer people using this site. Since this is a site that caters to non-programmers, I'd rather y'all make some of that structure.

The wiki portion is somewhat designed to finally kill quartzcompositions.com's wiki once and for all, but in a non-hostile way. [perhaps this can be used as a template to start out?]

Would it be more helpful if the wiki was a total fork from the drupal nightmare? (i.e. it was a stock mediawiki installation, rather than a collection of wiki-like modules for drupal)

psonice's picture
Muddy feet

I see, so it's the "wait for tracks to appear in the grass, then you know where to build the paths" approach. Meanwhile, we all get muddy feet ;D

As a suggestion to get things moving then, how about the wiki replaces the whole old site?

I can see the wiki working as it is now, with a front page, some kind of nicely structured links to the plugins etc., an 'intro to QC' type page with links to various intro/tutorials, and discussion 'in a tab'.

That structure could keep the discussion organised too, as you'd have say a GL tools page, with a version history, and a discussion on the talk tab. Anything useful in the chat could be moved to the GL tools wiki page, but I guess the catch will be that the discussion will get too long to be useful, so I think the discussion still needs more optimising (maybe organised by thread like now, but with the most recently updated thread at the top of the list?)

toneburst's picture
Nice

..metaphor, there...

alx

Quartz Composer Blog: http://machinesdontcare.wordpress.com

Music Site: http://www.toneburst.net

cwright's picture
model

Ok, I think this is what we're going to try (internally, we've been doing a lot of restructuring the past couple days):

In the Forums, there are a few new forums (with appropriate permissions):

  • Release
    • Alpha
    • Beta
    • Production

Each future release will link to a forum topic in the corresponding forum, Where comments will go. Discussion will thus always be in the forums.

We're working on a mechanism to lock and archive forum discussions (called "Archiving") that will prevent new comments from getting added. This will be applied to release discussions when an updated release is published. Hopefully this will keep discussions from getting uselessly long, off-topic, and mis-applied.

Static content (howtos, reference material) will slowly get moved to the wiki (which is supposed to serve as a reference, not so much a discussion/Q&A thing) as we have time.

The ultimate design goal (kineme 1.2?) is that forums will be the active discussions (including, but not limited to, releases), wiki will be the reference material (for QC in general, as well as our stuff I guess?), and everything else (where "everything else" is hopefully a small portion that doesn't get in the way, or is easily coalesced into something higher-level)

tobyspark's picture
now i'm just totally

now i'm just totally confused, and not in a good way. more forums fiddling? an empty wiki?

fwiw, i never go into the forums at top level. i'm interested in whats new, or whats related to patches.

being cheeky again, if you're going to do the berkley campus experiment then i'd say stop fiddling with the site as-is, in fact freeze it, and work with the wiki alone. see where it gets you.

cwright's picture
two-fold

these changes are two-fold:

1) We want to consolidate comments and discussions, so they're easier to find/closer together (hence the forums changes). Hopefully this will make finding "What's new" easier, since it will all be somewhat more in the same place, rather than scattered all over the site (there are lots of good discussions attached to ancient releases... no one sees those anymore).

2) Unrelatedly, we're also making the wiki (in progress) to facilitate non-discussion, static content (how to's, notes on built-in patches, etc), with the hope that it will clean out static content from the forums (there are some documentation-like things in there that shouldn't be there). This is the "what's related to patches" part (non-changing, not new stuff) (beginners have asked for this a few times, like here: http://kineme.net/Discussion/GeneralDiscussion/kinemenet20ReDesign#comment-2021)

As far as I can tell, these are the last of the large-ish changes for a while; probably until the 2.0 redesign (whenever that happens...) Just a big clean-up, more or less. Sorry if it's confusing, frustrating, etc.

yanomano's picture
Secret Lounge ?.

Ok I discover the secret lounge !...:) Totally confusing as you said !

cwright's picture
Raison d'être

the talk stuff is separated from the content here because we want the wiki pages to be "definitive" content, while stuff that's under discussion takes place under the Talk tab (similar to wikipedia). Sorry the comment links to go there directly don't really work...

toneburst's picture
This is really difficult.

This is really difficult. I think I agree there should be a repository of plugins, with just a brief description of each one, and possibly a downloadable example QTZ. The problem is, since this is a site about developing new plugins, it's really hard to make a distinction between stuff about existing plugins, and stuff related to new plugins. I agree completely the previous scheme was very confusing and hard to navigate. On the other hand, we've built up quite a nice little community here, largely through communicating through this site, so something must be right. Maybe the problem is more of a design issue than a data-organisation one. I can see the tabbing approach works for programmers (afterall, you see that kind of thing all the time), but maybe something as simple as putting alternating subtle background colours behind related sub-threads would help the rest of us mere mortals... I know it's a 'bit Excel', but it might work.

Just a thought...

alx

Quartz Composer Blog: http://machinesdontcare.wordpress.com

Music Site: http://www.toneburst.net

usefuldesign.au's picture
Re: Kineme Documentation

I had to do a Kineme search to find the 3rd Party Plugins list page to help somebody find an Image PixelS plugin link.

I wasn't apparent to me how to find my way to the page through a Heirachical method ie. Goto Kineme home page and find a link to something that looks like the list or might have the list.

I've said this before (I know) and I am grateful for kineme.net in its current form but the site organisation — well specifically — the visual representation of its organisation is pretty average for such a big site covering some many roles (shop, support, forums, FAQ, wiki)