[ANN] tinyDictionary 0_8_1_0

[Richard Gaskin]

Mike Kerner wrote:

 > The cool thing about TD is that you don't necessarily have to write
 > anything.  For example, Mark's AR note from yesterday can be
 > installed into TD as-is, which is exactly what Bernd did, yesterday.
 > He copied and pasted the email into a text file and sent it to me. A
 > couple of clicks later, and Mark's email was attached to
 > acceleratedRendering.  As I found out when I was trying to get some
 > changes submitted for the dictionary, there is a lot more to getting
 > it formatted for a dictionary entry.  For a note, not so
 > much.  It's a note, a comment, etc.  You can use TD more like a wiki.

Good point.  What we have with that post and many others like it are 
effectively Tech Notes, distinct from Dictionary Entries and Tutorials.

It's nice that Bernd has the time and interest in maintaining such a 
collection, but as you noted his Dictionary is separate from the IDE, 
and as such those Tech Notes are lost to the majority of LC users 
(except for those using TD and the handful of us who've been obsessively 
bookmarking such things over the years).

It seems that both TD users and everyone else might benefit from a 
knowledge base of Tech Notes if they were made part of the LC repo, and 
the LC docs system extended to include them along with the other forms 
of learning materials.

With a central place for a Tech Note repository, Bernd's work would be 
simplified by merely adding one extension to his system and everything 
there comes along for the ride.

But beyond saving Bernd the extra work, such content would be in a form 
that could benefit the entire LC audience, no matter which mix of 
plugins that may be using at any given time.

A wiki might be a suitable alternative to a Mardwon-centric repo like 
Github.  MaxV has a wiki, and I've offered before (and my offer still 
stands) to migrate that content to one of my LiveCode domains like 
LiveCodeJournal.com using Wikimedia, the package Wikipedia uses, so we 
can have the flexibility of a proven wiki engine but without the ads 
that are an understandable by-product of a free hosting service.


TL;DR:

Less formal Tech Notes are a valuable part of our community's collective 
knowledge base, and it would be ideal to have a curated collection of them.

Once we do, any tools that could benefit from including them could do so 
easily.

The value of the information is proportionate to the size of the 
audience reading it.  The more easily informal Tech Notes can be 
available to everyone, the more the community as a whole can realize 
their value.

IMO the format and location of the collection is less important than 
that it exists.

A pile of text files in a server directory today would be more valuable 
than a perfectly-formatted collection that doesn't exist.

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