Where have these wishes and feature requests been discussed or even decided ??
I would find it useful to build up the discussion here, since it is open and central. It is also not so easy to "loose" this page in an archive like in the mailing lists.
There are feature requests in the Berlios DeepaMehta Page, as already linked. A lot of them were just added cause of the rising needs of a user or developer while working with DeepaMehta. A Discussion was maybe held within a small group, or not at all. Discussions are very promising, if held verbal within a personal dialog, but we could also do this here and for all who already uses DeepaMehta, within the Community Workspace as described. Let`s see if it works out. Looking forward to that.
- Thanks, Malte! What I would like to discuss as soon as possible is the following: Whether it is possible to segment the end user documentation and tutorials into several levels or stages, the first of which would not yet contain the groupware functions and meta-types that intimidate the user because s/he fears that s/he might damage work of others or at least bother others. Ideally, the corresponding functionality could be initially switched off altogether, until the user chooses to switch it on if they think that the progress in their experience justifies it. See also my feature request # 002965 that I called "think tool mode". What do you think? PS, I could help with the tutorial of the first level.
Ah, Mathias, i couldn`t match your ip :), thank you! Different stages/levels make sense to me within the documentation. For the screen casts we still have to write some kind of storyboard or use-case which we could show visually and comment with our voice. There are some ideas yet, but no concrete ones. Until the 5th of May it would be useful to have some scenarios already discussed which we could record at this evening from within a screen. It would be enough to show some Basic Operations while working with Text Content or/and Image Content (e.g. Retyping, Creating, Searching and connecting)
On the documentation topics, i would distinct between written user-docs and audiovisual but generally i think a distinction of levels sounds useful in both. I could also imagine a screen cast of how to implement new topics on the fly as input for advanced "users". About your switching metamode i am not sure if i am getting your ideas right and i will have a look again on your wish. i would encourage every new user to create his own workspace within a tutorial and show him all the magic of the concepts of OOP in the user interface, in his workspace he can`t do anything wrong with creating totally blank new types but maybe there are users were it would be useful for administrators to don`t give them the access rights to all the TopicTypes. Am i understanding your direction? at least within these paragraph i see plenty of new pages :) i would like to start with this one Screencasts
- Maybe I have a wrong idea about how simple an unbreakable sandbox environment must be, because in MY environment "matthias" on the online server, things have grown really weird (as I mentioned in the thread http://www.deepamehta.de:8080/messageboard/controller?action=showMessage&id=t-63620 ), and for instance, I had two sorts of "institution" to search for and I couldn't join the community application workspace; in the meantime I cannot even search for it - probably my account needs to be completely scratched and set up new. If you don't know the code you just don't get a feel for what's your own stuff and what's shared.
- i read your post through again, sorry for not responding when you posted it, it somehow got lost. i cleaned up your "view in use" associations from the personal maps you mentioned, cause you are not an administrator of the collaborative demo instance, you were not allowed to delete this type of associations. i tried to join the community workspace with a blank new account and it worked out. The shared workspace "DeepaMehta Community" is public, i can`t explain the behavior you described. that you may find the "Institution" type associated to more than related to one workspace is the current state of development, members of all associated workspaces will find all the same instances of this type in their result list, that`s why they are soo big sometimes.
- There is also another reason why the first level should be very simple: after the basic first steps, the different usage scenarios will very early split up radically in two major branches: One that emphasizes the STORAGE/ database aspects of the innovative object model, and a second one that will embrace the great, unique affordances of VISUALIZING things. Since I definitely belong to the latter fraction, I am sure that, for this scenario, the most common use will be the temporary processing of visual relationships, from many (imported) but simple (generic) items, and once the map is finished, in won't be very important to show it off or share it.