So this weekend I decided to get to some actions that I’ve always wanted (as opposed to always adding markup) and I have to say I was pretty disappointed in the documentation. No index, lots of typos, little to no real world examples, no TOC, no hyperlinks… and it doesn’t look like it has been touched in years. I would think Softpress would want to make it as easy as possible on noobie action creators but apparently this is not the case.
I am thinking about cleaning this up for my own use, but am curious if Softpress and friends have any plans to update this info in the near future.
A lot of it is just copy and paste from the old documentation, which
is just as you say – quite long in the tooth – but some of it is
new, particularly a great deal written by Weaver and Tim Plumb.
Documentation is hard, and a real art to do well. I wish as you do
that Softpress would carry this water for me, but sometimes you have
to provide for yourself! So that’s a nice way of saying – fix the
typos, and ask questions that need answering. We can build something
better if we all contribute a little bit.
Walter
On Oct 24, 2010, at 7:57 AM, Solutions Etcetera wrote:
So this weekend I decided to get to some actions that I’ve always
wanted (as opposed to always adding markup) and I have to say I was
pretty disappointed in the documentation. No index, lots of typos,
little to no real world examples, no TOC, no hyperlinks… and it
doesn’t look like it has been touched in years. I would think
Softpress would want to make it as easy as possible on noobie action
creators but apparently this is not the case.
I am thinking about cleaning this up for my own use, but am curious
if Softpress and friends have any plans to update this info in the
near future.
Well, if you want to make a desktop interface to this, I can make it
available to you in RSS or another flavor of XML, pretty easily. You
could build a lookup-and-cache desktop app that relies on the net for
anything you haven’t looked up recently, and local storage for
anything that isn’t older than some cache threshold. A sort of
Hitchhiker’s Guide to Action-building or something like that. Put a
nice big Don’t Panic on the cover…
As far as the Action writing community, there’s about a dozen of us
who make our work publicly available, but I suspect there may be a
larger part of the iceberg working on secret-sauce private Actions to
make a better living or a higher profit margin. That number is
impossible to tell for sure.
Could we have a show of hands? Anyone on this list who has written an
Action but never released it publicly, either for pay or free, please
let’s hear from you!
Walter
On Oct 24, 2010, at 12:35 PM, Solutions Etcetera wrote:
Thank you for this… it is a significant improvement. Wish I would
have known about it Friday night.
But I was thinking more of a desktop app similar to the help system
I wrote for SuperCard.
BTW… do you know just how big the action developing community is?
On 24 Oct 2010, 1:53 pm, waltd wrote:
I’ve been encouraging the Action community to contribute to a Wiki
here: