What do you think of ShowMeDo

[Paul Hemans]

I was fishing for a response, by posting multiple replies
Inadvertantly, I have offended one of the Python rabbis
For this misdemeanor I am most contrite
But I still got a fish to bite.

 

[Terry Reedy]

OH - something you mentioned that didn't seem to be addressed.
import - load a complete library
from - obtain specific 'function'(s) from a library

from can also be used to get a specific module from a package

If you 'import pack.mod', then you have to write 'pack.mod.ob' to access
anything within mod. But if you do 'from pack import mod', then just
'mod.ob' works.

 

[Gasto]

Smart ass talking.

Why don't you do a thing then. Following an analogy of what you write.

Put youself in Kyran's and Ian's shoes.

*
You create a website to help people learn open source software and
open source programming. You start off with a few dozen of videos.

People start coming to the site. There are expenses to be dealt with
so a Club membership is created to deal with the expenses of site
maintenance and server bandwith, etc. You create a bunch of Python
videos, you suggest other authors to contribute, the site gets crowded
with good and free ('free' as in free to draw a gun and shoot at your
legs) and informative tutorial videos. That site gets praises by
appreciative people. The site gets a major update and server change.

Unappreciative people start writing stupid feedback in Usenet
comp.lang.python . You address the reasons why ShowMeDo has its faults
(like any other site), namely one man for the whole site. Idiots keep
complaining about the UI being 'unreachable' (while the more adequate
term would be 'improvable')
*

I guess that if you had created something, purely under philanthropic
purpose, you'd understand at first glance. But what could be expected
from a sewer rat that suggests to pay 10ths of thousands of dollars of
UI experts on a philanthropic site?

Go sell your *ss for that price, if you are so capitalism hungry. And
contemplate appreciative people get smarter from ShowMeDo while your
at it.

I stumbled across this thread while typing a speculative 'showmedo' in
google, as you do while taking a break on a (very) late Tuesday evening..
To declare my interest, as things stand I amShowmedoCEO, CTO,
boywhomakesthetea etc.. I'm not going to plug anything specific and
normally let these things go but it's comp.lang.python and a
misconception is a misconception. Besides which, every now and then an
attitude really grates.

Yeah, it really sucks when you spend time and effort to build something,
and then discover that it isn't what people want.

Or at least some people.

[...]

As for the author immediately above, I think he fails his own test of
prudence. There are rather blindingly obvious download links below each
video.

Perhaps you should forget your preconceptions and take a long, hard look
at the site with the eyes of a first time visitor.

As a first time visitor, this is what I see:

* A bunch of "stuff" all over the front page. My eye is drawn to a bunch
of thumbnails on the right hand side, which look somewhat vaguely what
I'd see on YouTube. So I click on a thumbnail, expecting to see a video,
but instead I get taken to a page with no video or download link. I think
this is what you call a "series", but at first the page just looks broken
to me -- where's the video?

* Since I'm unusually interested in your site, and have nothing better to
do, I click on the series heading, and go to another page. This one does
have a download link, and a broken "click here to play" icon. Oh well,
I'm used to video sites being broken on everything but IE, or requiring
Javascript, or both. So I click on the download link, and learn that you
require a login. Do I care enough about your content to create Yet
Another Damn Login Identity? No.

(And yet I care enough to spend 20 minutes explaining you how you could
improve your site. Fancy that. That's because if you improve your site,
it could be useful to me, but if I create a login account, I've got the
burden of dealing with yet another login account.)

* Since I'm feeling especially enthusiastic, I go back to the home page,
and click a link under the "Popular Paths" heading in the "Blog roll".
(You seem to be using the term blog roll to mean something completely
different to the way it is used in virtually every blogging site I've
ever seen.) This takes me to an even more complicated page showing a
"Path", filled with things that look like clickable buttons but aren't,
and thumbnails that at first glance look identical. If I spend a couple
of minutes inspecting them closely and mousing over them, I see that the
*left* hand side of the thumbnail is the author and the *right* hand side
is something else.

(No doubt some clever PHP programmer thought he was being clever to come
up with that UI abomination.)

* I see *one* thumbnail that has a "Click to play" icon next to it. None
of the others appear to be videos. There is no download link. I give up,
and decide that your website's UI is too large a barrier for me to bother
with it any further.

All that being said, I do feel the need to make that point that we have
generated 350 odd completely free video-tutorials for the Python
community, including some truly inspirational demonstrations, if the
feedback is anything to go by. The site has been refined over time and
is at least striving constantly to improve. But some people will always
focus only on the negatives. They are few and far between but
occasionally, during those long, dark teatimes of the soul, it does make
one wonder why one bothers. You provide them with free videos, make no
claim upon them and all they do is moan that the format is wrong or
their time too precious to waste on a non-mandatory signing- up, though
not so precious they can't take time out of their day to whinge about it
in a group posting. I think it's the kind of attitude that kills the
spirit of FOSS stone-dead.

You think that FOSS is under threat because people are willing to give
you feedback that your use of non-FOSS software (Flash) is inconvenient
to them? Oh dear.

For every person who takes the time to write about it, probably one
hundred people equally dislike your site but just walk away and never
come back. You should be dancing for joy that Ben gave you valuable
feedback about his user experience, instead of just walking away. Some
companies pay tens of thousands of dollars to hire UI consultants to make
sure their website is usable by first-time visitors, and that's excluding
development costs. I've just given you twenty minutes of my time writing
up my experiences for free. Is that enough in the spirit of FOSS for you?