Re: A way to activate our efforts / open multimedia standards / Re: Developers tools?

[Douglas Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

>>>thi == thi <ttn@mingle.glug.org> wrote at Sun, 6 Dec 1998 11:37:24 -0400 :

>Roman Suzi writes:
>
> > Summary: its very hard to decide  to  participate  in  a  large
> > eduware project due to lack of tools for  quiality  multimedia.
> > Could we instead make a lot little things ("quickies"), so  the
> > list of accomplishements will not look empty and  attract  more
> > people, more developers, more clients with their  wishes?  (and
> > at the same time we will start to get satisfaction early?)

>btw, i agree w/ your position: it is better to think both top-down and
>bottom-up simultaneously, than to overemphasize one or the other.

I agree with thi on this, although I don't think multimedia tools (of which
there are quite a few; just not ones designed for occasional use by people
not schooled in their use) are necessary for the administrative stuff we've
been talking about here.  For the "edutainment" things they would be useful,
but as I say they already exist.  What we're talking about is simple
authoring systems similar to HyperCard, ToolBook, etc.  I don't know of
anything outside of MetaCard that exists for Linux in this niche.

I talked to Stewart Allen (the author of VisualTcl) a while ago about
extending VisualTcl to become such an authoring system.  He wasn't averse to
it so long as whatever was done was folded back into the core VisualTcl
development tree, which is GPLed.  VisualTcl is written entirely in Tcl/Tk,
so if there's anyone interested in going in this direction contact Stewart.
You can find his email address on the vtcl website at
<http://www.neuron.com>.

--
Doug Loss            An idealist is one who, on noticing that
dloss@csrlink.net    roses smell better than cabbage, concludes
(717) 326-3987       that they will also make better soup.
                        H. L. Mencken