Why 10 hours for a newbie and 30 days for a "programmer" ?

[Dan Shafer]

I think there is a bit of blurring here but maybe it's just my eyesight.

10 hours is not nearly enough to learn Dreamcard.

But 10 hours seems to me to be a generous amount of time to decide 
whether to part with what is after all a small amount of money even if 
you opt for the big package deal. The videos that come with Dreamcard 
would take 2-3 hours to watch. The total running time of included 
videos is about 90 minutes. And they cover a good bit of ground. And 
each one has an accompanying PDF file the user who learns better that 
way can print out and read.

Then of course there's the online documentation. Just opening the FAQ 
and browsing a bit would lead an interested user to a fair amount of 
useful information. (It would be helpful if there was a roadmap file in 
the box; I don't know if there is or not since I haven't downloaded 
Dreamcard myself.)

Remembering that the audience for Dreamcard is hobbyists and newbies, 
they're likely to spend a couple of hours a night for a week or a few 
hours each day on a weekend looking over the product before deciding 
whether to plunk down $99.

One more thing. An arbitrary review period measured in ACTUAL time of 
usage rather than some number of days passing is, IMNSHO, a very smart 
and helpful thing. I can't tell you how many trial programs I've 
downloaded, looked at, figured they were worth a deeper look, and went 
back to some period of time later only to find that not only had the 
demo expired without my having time to get to know the product, but 
downloading a new time-limited demo wasn't feasible because of the way 
the publisher handled the lockout.

With Dreamcard, you could, e.g., open the product, watch a video or 
two, download the PDFs, then quit Rev, print out the PDFs and go read 
them at your leisure. Come back some arbitrary time later and try 
another video or even poke at building something that was described in 
one of the PDFs.

Ten may not turn out to be the right number, but the approach seems to 
me to be very wise. I congratulate RunRev for this decision and predict 
it will pay large dividends.

But, as I say, I'm an old codger so maybe the blurring is all in my 
mind.

heh heh


On Sep 1, 2004, at 10:12 AM, Mark Brownell wrote:

>
> On Wednesday, September 1, 2004, at 09:58 AM, Ken Ray wrote:
>
>> If that's true, then I agree with Judy that 10 hours is not enough 
>> time,
>> IMHO.
>>
>
> So make it 16 hours and kick them out at 1000 meters AGL.
>
> Mark
>
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>
>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Revolutionary
Author of  "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought"
http://www.revolutionpros.com for more info
Available at Runtime Revolution Store (http://www.runrev.com/RevPress)