Glimmer videos in general - a suggestion about them in the long run

[rubyFeedback]

Heya Andy,

I see you are working on adding more videos to the glimmer suite; actually on SWT, such as your recent "Glimmer DSL for SWT Video Tutorial 6". I assume you will probably add more videos like that in the coming months.

I had an idea about that, or related to that. Let me describe the use case.

Say that someone has been using ruby for a few months and now is looking for GUI-related options in general (in ruby), be it desktop-centric, web-centric, TUI-centric (ruby ncurses or something like that), commandline-centric - you name it.

So, after searching for a while that person finds glimmer. The videos that you have made available are to some extent a bit more centric to the SWT part I assume (you seem to have more advanced parts in SWT, such as the editor), but probably many things may work across the whole glimmer suite, for instance, ruby-tk and so forth. A button is a button after all.

What if there would be a "general intro" or "general promotional" video for glimmer? Kind of something where you can showcase some things that can be done via glimmer, but specifically that what could work across all or most GUIs. Kind of like a "common base" for the glimmer suite, specifically with the aim as a general introduction or general promotional video. An introduction to glimmer.

Something you can quickly show to someone else as an introduction. It should not be too short, but it should not be too long either. I don't know how long it should be, but I'd say below 3 minutes may be a bit too short-ish; people may pay more attention if it is a bit longer than 3 minutes I would venture a guess. But it should not be overlong either because staying focused is not so simple for everyone (my own attention span drops quite quickly after some time, so I often have to pause; I often run videos from youtube in the background, so I don't always pay attention to what is going on there).

The general use case for that "glimmer-video" would be about showcasing how things could work across the glimmer suite.

For instance, something where the demo can also show how things work in ruby-gtk, or opal/rails. Mostly just the basic stuff. Or perhaps if you want to, show some of the generic shapes, how this may look. Obviously you can not demonstrate everything in one video, but this is not so much the point anyway; just something that can show to people what glimmer is all about. And you could always finish with some more examples that are more advanced, such as tetris or whatever.

One important thing could be to show how people could easily adjust the code base. So for instance, just as in video #6 it is shown this require:

require 'glimmer-dsl-swt'

You could show the same example (if it works) for, instance, the tk variant for glimmer. And perhaps the opal/rails variant. (Again, I am just thinking of the basic stuff, such as button, or a box/div/container, not anything that is too complex).

The idea here would be that people could adjust the code or the toolkit in use very easily, and have that be mentioned in the video.

Anyway, I think I should end here as it is already quite long. Hopefully I could explain the basic gist of the idea. I am not saying this should be done now either, mind you! More like a long term goal, a "general intro video". The KDE folks even use music in their own "what is new in KDE plasma", but I am not sure music should be used for glimmer as such. While music is nice, often explanations are more useful. So the idea is more about a general intro that is useful though, like giving a newcomer ideas what is possible. (They can work through the README and the examples there, but some people may prefer video, so - different target audience perhaps.)

Perhaps after you made some more SWT-specific videos, the next one could be a bit more generic (I know the SWT ones are also kind of generic, as I assume the code will work at the least for some parts, such as "a button", but I mean more in the sense of looking at the whole glimmer suite as such; people are probably not fully aware of how they can use glimmer IF they didn't know glimmer yet, e. g. newcomers to glimmer specifically.).

Glimmer on! \o/