[lug] Simple video editing

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Fri, 2008-07-04 at 09:37 -0600, Kenneth D Weinert wrote:
> The problem with most documentation is that it's written by the
> technical folks.  The reason this is a problem is because technical
> folks find it *much* easier to write reference manuals than tutorials.

Personally, I find the problem is that engineers are terrible writers,
no matter what type of writing they have to do.  I've seen plenty of
reference manuals that suck too.  Heck, many developers can't even put
decent comments in their code.

> This is, of course, a generalization and not true of everyone. What we
> need are more open source technical writers - folks able to take the
> words and ideas and turn them into something understandable by people
> that haven't just spent several months/years in writing and/or
> enhancing some code.

Having done both (development and writing) I can tell you that writing
pays much less and is often highly freelance (so no steady income) so
writers spend more time trying to generate income than open source
developers.

> That is something that commercial software tends to have an advantage
> in - they pay people to write the words that help sell the software.
> They can afford to do it.

True, though it's not hard to find really bad manuals from commercial
software vendors.  This goes back to "engineers can't write" - writers
of commercial documentation are dependent on information from engineers,
and often that isn't very good information.

In my completely useless opinion, colleges (at least in the US) spend
plenty of time teaching students to become IT nerds or "creative
thinkers" and not nearly enough time on how to be good at communication
- or *WHY* that's important.  OMG, I could blame it on my BFF, but
texting wasn't around in the 80's and the problem existed then too.

> a real-life example of a
> program that has several fields on it with computation happening and
> those fields getting updated as the computations happen. 

Most GUI development these days is based on MVC designs.  Computation
takes place in one thread and display in another, with a glue layer
between to map data to display.
I don't use C# (or C++, both abominations in my opinion) but GTK+ bases
its Trees and Lists (and probably other objects) on MVC designs.

> Sorry for the aside, but I think it's related - it's an aspect of the
> same problem.

There still isn't a really good GTK+ book out there.  A loooong while
back I wrote the GLib chapters for Sams "Teach Yourself GTK+ in 24
Days", which wasn't bad.  But it's waaaay out of date today.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               Ximba End User Software
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                      http://www.ximba.org
LFS UserID: 16857
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