@singmajesty, I would like to propose a community driven tutorials for the OpenFL framework:
Let’s make a page, say, Tutorials, that would look like http://www.kirupa.com/developer/flash/index.htm . Yes! Just a list of links distributed roughly through abstract categories and the best thing is: everybody can share their peace of knowledge.
“How to use Actuate”
“Actuate vs TweenX”
“Macros in OpenFL”
“Switching between screens”
“Editing sounds in runtime”
etc.
People would come up with different topics and make an article in a window similar to this forum post (nothing more is needed). The articles would end up in a sandbox and… well it’s up to you, you can either have them hand-picked to be published in the tutorials page or make a rating system and let the community decide!
Reasons for this to happen:
Anybody can do it, everybody has a little trick that they could share.
No strict format will include wider range of posts
Better documentation, we always need more documentation
Beginners will start learning from such tutorials ( I started with kirupa 8 years ago )
We’ll finally be able to let go of the outdated forum info that pops-up in google
I’d be interested in facilitating something that makes it simple to dynamically share snippet code, project samples and tutorials, and possibly even just development blogs in general. I’m not really sure of the best format for this – an area of the forums? some other system? I’m not sure if we should handle it using hard links in the documentation, but love the idea of stirring this pot
Make another forum. To keep things simple, let’s assume it’s the same forum-type as now.
Make a separate page called Tutorials and have a list of hard-links for the tutorials, like in my example in the previous post.
The pages of the tutorials that are hard-linked are generated from the user-submitted forum topics as a simple HTML page. For now let’s say that the admin is choosing which tutorials to include by hand. It’s also easier to categorize them, because we don’t really know what content will be submitted at what pace. Maybe most will be about animation, maybe optimization etc.
To submit a tutorial, let’s just make a button, that would lead to the second forum (I’ll call it tutorial forum). Make a few sticky posts that would be a short and simple guideline to writing the posts. For example:
Show a preview of the end result in the beginning.
Include screen-shots
Don’t post code in a screen-shot, it’s annoying, make it selectable
etc.
Let the submitting users choose their own tags if the existing tags aren’t enough, it will be easier for you as well.
The tutorial forums should be accessible to all regardless of the post quality, but only the “good stuff” make it outside the tutorial forums to get it’s own page on the Tutorials page.
That’s about it.
If you manage to introduce this, similar or a better solution where I can post a tutorial by myself, I will find the time and post a tutorial for OpenFL As much as I could see, other people also have some material they’d love to share
Hey, i also thought of this and started learning haxe ufront (web framework) to implement it, on top of all you said i think users being able to vote and rate the submitted articles would add lots of value to it.
If anyone wants to team up for this project (already started doing research and learning related webdev stuff) i would gladly do so, if you find other ways to get it working I’ll gladly use it.
I think merging tutorials is a great idea. The new forum is a great text editor, maybe we could add a tutorial section were people can write tutorials. After that we can add a page with a list of links. .if you click it you get redirect to the post page. That way all tutorials look the same and we make sure we don’t get dead links
I just ran into this nice site the other night. HaxeCoder.com.
I think that OpenFL could use a book. Something like The Docker Book or a GitHub book, that can be easily updated and evolved. A GitHub book would be great because people that have created community content, like HaxeCoder.com, could be encourages to submit their tutorials to the book.
Adobe spent a lot of money hiring Evangelists who would write tutorials.
I really likes the idea which Adobe had for Adobe cookbook . It was something with small snippets of codes giving information how to do something . Other my favorite book is ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook
You guys are great coders, …but I disagree. ANY forum is by definition NOT a tutorial! I’m a newbie to Haxe and OpenFL and I’ve read dozens of forum “tutorials” and it is VERY difficult to learn from them EFFICIENTLY. A tutorial is the ‘how to’ and the ‘why’ parts of a user’s manual. Look at the users manuals of some formidable applications, e.g. Photoshop, MatLab, even an Epson printer manual. They teach by explaination. Most forums are just ‘look what this snippet does’ and they don’t explain the multi-faceted aspects of BOTH how and why things are done as may be shown in a snippet. I want lessons that I can follow from being a newbie to a point I can go off on my own. Like learning to drive a car: take someone who NEVER drove a car (in the passenger seat) and drive them around the city for 10 minutes in heavy traffic, then get out of the car and tell them “now you do it” (and walk away). That’s what forums are like to me. I’m sure well intended, but not efficient for teaching.
As an engineer in product development for a few decades I learned that experts in a field are the WORST people to produce a user manual. They could develop a structure/outline of points/features to be covered, but a WRITER should write the manual and then it should be reviewed for accuracy by the experts then tested by alpha guinea-pigs.
Also, a forum is not coherent, even with subject categories. It is a collection of dozens of different people’s ideas of how something may/should be done. Coding styles vary and thus may confuse a newbie. They are not sequential in terms of what should be taught first, second, third…etc. They tend to assume readers have higher bases of understanding than may be the case; in which case they can be confusing, even misleading. I.e. without prerequisite knowledge some examples are meaningless to someone trying to learn and logically progress in learning the tools.
You guys are great, more power to you. But…PLEASE do not use forums as tutorials. PLEASE consider what newbies need. If you don’t expand the human base of Haxe &or OpenFL users then it will eventually wither on the vine. Keep forums for after people get going.
You make some good points, but it sounds like you’re looking for a professionally-written book on OpenFL and aren’t willing to settle for anything less.
At the moment, what we have are a bunch of “experts” who are willing to help out, and this thread is a discussion of how to do so.
Is this directed at the tutorials given as examples (1, 2, 3), or at the content of these forums?
Because the idea isn’t to call the existing threads “tutorials.” The idea is to write proper tutorials and host them in a section of the forums. (Or maybe somewhere else; it’s far from settled.)
As the author of the original post I would like to bring more clearance as to why I’ve suggested this particular way:
The thing is that OpenFL itself is created by only a few people and it’s not easy to write documentation and develop the framework at the same time, so veteran users could possible help with that.
Then there’s a problem of making a “proper” tutorial section. The thing is, people who develop OpenFL don’t really have time to make that either, but I feel that it would be rather toxic for the community to have a tutorials page on a different site ran by a third party, because there’s already some clutter and it’s already hard to explain that there’s: lime, OpenFL, Haxe is a programming language and has it’s own compiler. Now imagine that all the “proper” learning content is hosted somewhere else?
So the idea is to make something easy and simple to implement (like the forums) and keep all the “drafts” of tutorials there. Simply because all the editing tools are totally enough to make tutorial content.
Later, the better quality tutorials could become HTML5 rendered pages available in their own section as static pages, so it doesn’t have to be “just code snippets”, we actually can even embed Flash SWF’s and/or movies.
And one more thing that made me make the proposition - devs are usually busy at their day jobs so it’s not often when we have the chance to write a tutorial, but most of the times everybody can write at least one useful tutorial or tip&trick post, so instead of giving Writer title to a small group - we should let everyone be able to submit posts to the sandbox.
And lastly - the wiki won’t work. It’s too “hidden”, I insist that tutorials should have a link on the top along with every other section of the site.
I am a newbie but how about taking the table of contents of an existing similar actionscript book and trying to “rewrite” it for haxe/openFL. I would suggest the free OReilly ebook Introducing Starling (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920024217.do). I think it has a good and simple content sequence.
If you do that and need help translating from french I can participate.
Even though translating is faster that writing and some parts, the ones selling as3 and all the as3 source code, have to be rewritten we’re still talking about around a thousand pages pdf so at least 500 pages to actually translate.
But having such a big manual for openfl would be pretty awesome
Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but no, I didn’t say I would not settle for anything less than a proffessionally-written book. I was hoping to point out how a non-expert, a newbie, might feel about endeavoring into a new language and tools.
A bunch of expets who are as willing as you guys is a VERY good start. I’m mainly saying it is often difficult for experts to put themselves into the shoes of a newbie for the purpose of writing a tutorial AND if such is done then it should follow a logical progression that such a newbie would need to follow in order to most efficiently progress to a point where he would be reasonably proficient.
As a newbie myself, I’d be interested in being your alpha-guinea-pig for such a set of tutorials, hosted where ever.
As much as I could see, other people also have some material they’d love to share 