So after a discussion with our advisor on Friday, a conclusion has been reached regarding the issue I spoke about in my last blog post. We're going to take the best of both worlds: Have a pre-defined project file (in NetBeans) included and then also specify a tutorial that will teach people how to create thier own project files. This tutorial will teach people about what is required to develop Darkstar applications from within multiple IDE's, namely NetBeans and Eclipse. Also, I added a section detailing what is required outside of IDE development as well. I was going to create pre-made projects for Eclipse as well, but the way Eclipse's project files are set up, you cannot have projects that are sharable without redefining required libraries. I was honestly suprised and slightly dissapointed at this, as it is a major downfall of what is normally a very solid IDE. However, we still always have the tutorial for creating Eclipse projects, so for now it will do.
Anyways. What have I been up to lately? Well, as the title suggests, I HAVE been pretty busy over the past several days (this is also one of the few times when the title actually made some sense). Basically I've been writing, writing, writing, and writing. Oh, and writing; can't forget about that one. And by writing I don't mean coding; I mean writing out project documents in text files. About a week ago when me and my project partners divied out tasks for the week, my friend and I were split between two tasks: writing the code for the tutorials and writing the actual text for them. He offered me the choice, and at the time I didn't care so we flipped a coin to determine who would do what.
Sometimes I really wish I had just chosen to write the code.
Writing each individual tutorial took much longer than expected. Even though there wasn't a lot of code I had to explain in detail every possible thing that was going on in order not to confuse the user. One of the things I keep in mind when I write them is that if I leave anything, anything at all, unexplained or amiguous then there is at least one user out there who is not going to get it, run in to problems, get confused /frustrated, and give up. And that means we've failed to provide an adequate out-of-the-box experience. Also, too much text can overwhelm the reader even if what is being explained is fairly trivial. So it's a tricky balance to get everything perfect.
Fortunately, I'm not the only person working on it. While I did all the text, my group members looked at it and made edits, suggestions, etc. I want to go over it one more time but so far I think it's really coming along. The tutorials are now in the process of being formatted into HTML documents, and I have to say, they look VERY nice. I'm truly impressed and pleased to see the results which so far have exceeded my expectations which usually doesn't happen that often, at least for me.
So thing have been coming along and I think we've made a lot of progress over a short time frame; however, there is still a lot that needs to get done. Mainly, I am slightly worried about the actual Snowman tutorials but as of right now I don't think I have enough information to comment on the status of those. We'll how it turns out, I guess.
Indeed.
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