Helping newcomers anticipate that standalones can't save to themselves

[Richard Gaskin]

Alain Farmer wrote:

 > Lack of documentation, tutorials, and ready-to-reuse stacks is
 > crippling; especially for newbies, but also for seasoned veterans
 > of xTalk (like myself and many oldies on this list).

It would be helpful if we could all take a really good look at what we 
have now to see if we can arrive at specific actionable recommendations 
to improve them.

Looking just as the items included with the IDE install, the current 
inventory of learning materials includes:

- 378-page User Guide PDF:  true, its copyright date may make it
   seem old, but nearly every word of it is as relevant today as
   when it was written.  And despite many requests here and elsewhere
   for specific reports against it, very few instances of truly
   erroneous information there have ever been reported.
   Better still:  Dan Shafer has generously offered to lead an
   effort to do a thorough tech edit on this for v7, which I'll be
   helping with.  The RunRev team has posted the Word source files
   to GitHub to get that started.  If anyone here would like to help
   we'll be divvying up chapters soon, so drop me a note.

- 78 tutorial stacks in the Resources window: covering a wide range
   of topics from working with images and databases to writing client-
   server apps like a chat client, they're not bad and many make a good
   starting point for one's own projects.  We could add more, and it
   may be helpful to review the ones we have to determine which others
   we might want to see added to it.

- 20 prefab components in the Object Library:  this library is
   extensible, so we could make any number of new components to share.
   Which ones should we make?

- Many dozens of supplemental tutorials and guides: linked to in the
   Help menu, these topics cover things like the nuances of working with
   the data grid, setting up LiveCode Server, and lots more.  What other
   tutorials might we add to those?


Looking at the scope of resources, obviously they could benefit from 
being collated into a single collection.  Ben Beaumont is working on 
that now, and while I don't know the full status on that in terms of 
feature release dates I do know it's a keen interest of theirs and 
they're very open to engaging to community to expand on these things.

So let's get what we want.  Who's in a position to help with either 
crafting new learning materials, or joining in the forums to brainstorm 
ways to make the most of the learning materials we have?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com