Demo Movies?
Susanna
interface has changed since I recorded the last ones. If you have any
feedback on the last set of movies, please let me know.
E.g.
- Topics covered
- Length of individual movies
- Pace
Thanks,
Susanna
Paul Unger
'clicky'?) and had me glued to my seat. The plot lines were clear and
well developed in each of the shorts, and the cast played its role
superbly. The CG effects were stunning--incredibly true-to-life with
seamless transitions! Sound effects were brought to a new level, but--
and this would be the only 'low' point in an overall highly rated
cinematic venture--the sound track will not be selling out any time
soon . . . Despite the lack of a singable soundtrack, I give FLEx demo
movies two thumbs up. I haven't screened the TE movies yet, but I
expect they reflect the same high quality production values as the
FLEx movies.
Paul
Bruce Anderson
I'd like to suggest adding a couple of themes that are oriented to people who are thinking of switching to FLEx.
- How to set up a typical project. I know, you may say that there is no such thing. No matter - just pick some reasonable set of start-up parameters and go with them. Assume some familiarity with Toolbox.
- Initial set up
- Entering a few lexical items
- Entering some text
- Manual glossing
- Exporting to a dictionary, etc.
The idea being to allow someone (like me, for instance) to download and install FLEx and get started doing something. Clearly, anyone who follows that path will have to start over again anyway, so picking the wrong parameters to start with won't matter.
This would allow me (or anyone else) to watch you do it, then try it themsleves with their own data, then be in a position to know enough about the territory to start asking the right questions to do what they really want to do.
Bruce Anderson
From: Susanna <susann...@sil.org>
To: FLEx list <flex...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 7, 2009 4:13:38 PM
Subject: [FLEx] Demo Movies?
Robert Hedinger
that I always like to see is a summary of all the helps that are available
on FLEx. Perhaps you could put something in a movie?
Another thing may be something on importing an existing MDF database with
the things that need tweaking before importing so you get a clean import.
Not sure whether these things would lend themselves to making a demo movie.
Robert
Ginger Boyd
I’ve only had minimal exposure to these demo movies. I don’t use them for myself very often, and they’re not particularly useful to me in training since I work in a francophone area and FLEx is still rather heavily Anglophone.
And on that topic, I recently finished a week-long very basic workshop on using FLEx to interlinearise texts for Cameroonian MT linguistics. Most of the comments in the evaluation were rather positive (even though I barely taught 10% of the programme’s capacity) but there were two “needs improvement” comments offered:
1) The French interface isn’t complete; and many of the terms and explanations are still in English which proved rather difficult for many of the participants who had minimal linguistics and no English; a full French interface including Helps and Demos would be most gratefully received!
2) There were a few complaints about the slowness of the programme (on Vista computers with at least 1 Giga of RAM). All the participants would want the latest upgrade as soon as it comes out, in hopes of speeding things up a bit.
I know the developers are rather busy, nevertheless, I send on this message from my workshop participants as they asked me to do.
Ginger
Doug Higby
Thursday, July 9, 2009, 2:28:35 PM, you wrote:
Ginger> 1) The French interface isn’t complete; and many of the terms
Ginger> and explanations are still in English which proved rather difficult
Ginger> for many of the participants who had minimal linguistics and no
Ginger> English; a full French interface including Helps and Demos would be most gratefully received!
I'm not sure that you were using the latest translations. The ones installed
by default with 5.4.1 are very incomplete need to be fixed by copying the
fixed files into the program directory. The guys from the Outilingua
workshop had copies of those translation files on their USB drives and you
could ask for them.
--
Doug mailto:Doug_...@sil.org
Language Software Coordinator
SIL Africa Area
Marlin_...@gial.edu
Susanna, my students and I find the Demo Movies very helpful. Thanks for all you do in the demo movies. The multimedia of them make it very effective for many of the younger generation growing up with the internet, television, radio, and cell phones. However, you do realize that you now will have to do them in French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Swahili, Mandarin, Indonesian, Melanesian English, and umpteen other languages of wider communication. :-)
I would concur with those who already metioned they'd like to see some movies on importing data, setting up new projects, and installing spelling dictionaries. I'd also like movies on setting up, adding, and changing Writing systems, formatting styles, merging and moving entries and senses.
Maybe you could show examples of opening and tiling 2 windows, and dragging senses to another window. (Will version 6 include copying information in senses and fields to other entries and senses? If so, that would be good to demo.) It would be helpful to show demos of adding more than one translation to an example such as a literal translation, and moving the order of examples. I'd like a demo of changing the columns and their order within search dialog boxes like the Insert entry and Find dialogs in the lexicon. Also in the texts & words panes various views for concordances, spelling, etc. Perhaps showing an example or two of sorting and filtering in the Texts and Words area would help give useful ideas of how to use the tools there.
Thanks again for all your hard work, Susanna.
Marlin
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