A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild

Nao

  • Dadman with a boy
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A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« on July 8th, 2011, 05:40 PM »
The unlucky streak had to come to an end, so it seems like my life is relatively back on track. I was at least able to devote way more time to Wedge this week, and hopefully can keep doing so in the coming weeks (and months.) And because good news come in pairs, Pete is back to work as well.

In the ten days or so since my last post, we made a total of 26 commits (at least another coming from me later tonight), some of which are, as usual, really huge with dozens of changes.
The most interesting one (in my humble bastard's opinion) is another redesign of the default theme, urged by the upcoming day when I'll release the first official screenshots. See, it's interesting to give oneself a target release date for something, because then you start wondering whether you'll be happy with it on that day. And when you decide you won't, you get back to work and try to fix that. As a result, Wine has evolved even more, most notably in the choice of fonts. You'll have to trust me when you see it: Wine used to be okay, but not exciting. Now I think it is. As least those who could see it seem to agree I'm on the right track. One day, mastery of web design will be mine. Oh yes. It will be mine. So... Screenshots, eh? Not today mates! But soon, very soon. Hopefully next w... uh, I mean when we reach 100 Likes on our Facebook page.[1]

Pete committed, among other things, his first version of the new admin homepage.
It's certainly a good start for finding motivation to strip even more things away from the old SMF codebase. Bad menu structure. Options that have been there for years and that nobody ever used. Chocobos and Peruvian pan flute players.
Discussions are still ongoing on many more features. We're active and excited again. Well, when I say "excited", we always were, we were just tired -- working on a secret project for a year was never gonna be easy, it turned out to be even harder. And when I say "active", I mean in comparison to last month. I mean, I now spend about 8 to 12 hours a day on Wedge, when I used to work only 4 to 8 hours on it, mostly because of my computer troubles. What a slacker really!

My to-do list is still filling up faster than I can actually empty it, but I'm used to that now -- my to-do list for Kyodai Mahjongg was miles long when I stopped working on it. There just wasn't anything on it that was worthy of the time I'd have spent on it. So, just like in the good old times, my to-do list is mostly there as a reminder of what I can do if I find myself out of new ideas. Which usually never lasts more than a few minutes. And believe me, the ideas I regularly get and put into my to-do are pretty good overall. I keep thinking, "hopefully I won't have to be the one implementing them... But I'll do them, even if it costs me years. And my social life."

So... Screenshots next week, and hopefully an alpha at the end of the month. Although I wouldn't hold my breath for a public release by then -- a private release is likely, but others will probably have to wait until late August. And yes, that does mean I get to spend my entire Summer working like crazy on Wedge. Isn't that cool? What do you mean pathetic? Oh, now you flatter me. Two sugars dear, please.
 1. Apparently, that's how people do it. I think we'll release Wedge Gold when we reach one million fans. Hopefully that's in less than 5 years. Would be fun to have you wait to get a product that's been ready for years. Would be like SMF 2.

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #31, on July 12th, 2011, 12:05 AM »
Quote from Arantor on July 11th, 2011, 05:18 PM
I personally prefer stylings but on the flip side, I'm happy to bow to the court of vocal majority if that's preferred term on it. And, fair enough, it IS, really, more common.
Yeah. Skins wasn't my original choice, but I think it makes a lot of sense. I just didn't think about it earlier.
And having a 'skins' subfolder would certainly make more sense to noobs than what SMF has ('css'), or even what Wedge currently has ('styles'), which isn't even the same as the name of the feature (stylings). Meh!
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That said, our 'skins' are more flexible than most, I think.
Skins encompass such a large amount of implementations with different levels of complexity...
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I thought we were going to go with add-ons? :P
Well that's what you're going to... I always said I preferred 'plugins' :P
Now, obviously 95% of the SMF community says 'mods'. Maybe it's make sense to use 'mods', then. Although, in that particular case, it's not really a noob-friendly name. It's just what the community uses.
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You know as well as I do that our users will tend to disagree anyway, and will call them themes and mods, because they're familiar terms.
But themes aren't skins. Skins are children of themes. A theme can be a folder with simply a different index.template.php, while it can't be just an index.css AFAIK. Whereas skins/stylings can be just an index.css file, but not an index.template.php file.

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #33, on July 12th, 2011, 12:23 AM »
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Well that's what you're going to... I always said I preferred 'plugins'
Well, there's a slight semantic difference between plugin and add-on, which is why I went for add-on as a term. I really don't care what we call it provided that 1) we're consistent and 2) that it makes sense. Heck, we can even use an unrelated word if there's some logical reason for it (like I, oddly, suggested 'drawers' for Simple*Desk*, moons ago)
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But themes aren't skins.
Yes, yes, I know that, but our users won't care what the difference is. It's like that line out of the first PotC - "We're going to steal a ship? That ship?" - "Commandeer. We're going to commandeer that ship. Nautical term." As in, it doesn't matter what we call them, our users will do it wrong - because that's life. It doesn't help that other software uses the same terms in different ways.


Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #35, on July 12th, 2011, 12:34 AM »
Quote from Arantor on July 12th, 2011, 12:23 AM
...it doesn't matter what we call them, our users will do it wrong - because that's life.
Precisely, users will always start off calling it whatever they called it on a previous platform or for the complete noobs, they'll call it what they believe doesn't make them sound stupid.... after a while however the Wedge terminology will catch on.

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #36, on July 12th, 2011, 01:22 AM »
Wonderful.

So I have been 7 months trying to forget the word "mods" and call them "plugins" instead and now Arantor says the proper word is "add-ons" and Nao want to call them mods again.

Can you please make your mind?  :eheh:

Only joking. As a lot of you have already said it doesn't really matter, because the people will get use to whatever word you chose. For example when I started with SMF ages ago, I came from the Joomla community and was used to call them components, modules and mambots, so the word mods was new to me and I adapted really quick.

In fact I think the word that make more sense is "add-ons", because they are not "modifying" anything in the core but "adding" a functionality.


Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #38, on July 12th, 2011, 04:44 AM »
Quote from Arantor on July 12th, 2011, 12:23 AM
Well, there's a slight semantic difference between plugin and add-on, which is why I went for add-on as a term. I really don't care what we call it provided that 1) we're consistent and 2) that it makes sense. Heck, we can even use an unrelated word if there's some logical reason for it (like I, oddly, suggested 'drawers' for Simple*Desk*, moons ago)
Perhaps a new-use word related to the Wedge idea, like Lever (another Simple Machine) or Sliver (an extended wedge) is called for if none of the other currently used terms will fit.

From the way you all have been describing how the add-ons/plugins will interact with Wedge (no template/code changes to the base), "extension" seems like an appropriate and widely accepted term to me.


Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #40, on July 12th, 2011, 06:41 AM »
Chrome is simpler and I like simple, although I've been trying to use Firefox but it keeps failing for me. Maybe FF6 beta would be better.

IMO I'd go with modules for independent modifications, and plugins which modify a code. Since you can't modify the code, I'd keep modules. And I like templates and skins better, makes best sense to me.