Popularising the TW

[Joe Armstrong]

I was having a discussion with my wife about the TW -- I was saying how great it was and so on and how useful it would be for her to learn and use.

She was unconvinced - she said "only programmers are interested in things like this" 

I tried to convince her - but she wasn't convinced by all the  "you can filter things on tags" arguments (which for me is the killer argument).

"What's it useful for?" she said.

(good question)

"Everything," I said.

After a while she came up with two ideas which thought I'd like to discuss here:

She said: "You need an app, it's got to be easy to use", and "how about recipes?"

The app bit is easy - it must run on an iPhone/Android/iPad and hide all the details of saving/restoring versions.

(aside) Is it easy to use? - the node version which I use is not user-friendly to the total beginner - the all-in-one html version has dire warnings about backup copies -- not something for total non-computer types - for them it should just work. (/aside)

What about recipes? - this seems like a good idea - If one tiddler = one recipe then the tagging becomes easy, we can tag by ingredient (flour, butter, potatoes) skill (easy, gourmet) time to prepare (20min, 30 min) calories (high, low) etc.

It's a lot of tags per recipe - BUT the mental model of a filter is easy

tag[easy]tag[vegan]...

To gain traction we'd need a lot of recipes

so this might be a nice project to write an off-line program to transform a collection of open-source recipes (if there are such things) into a TW.

The net result would be rather nice - in the old days (before the Internet) family recipes were passed on from generation to generation. 

A TW recipe book would represent an interesting challenge. We need:

 - loads of recipes

 - to hide most of the TW

 - to expose a user-friendly interface

 - to provide nice printouts

Once done package this as an app "my recipe book" and only expose the TW in a gentle and non-threatening manner.

Are there any TW recipe books or collections of open-source recipes that can be turned into tiddlers?

Cheers

/Joe

 

[Jeremy Ruston]

Great thread! I think many of us have been through similar conversations over the years...

I do use TiddlyWiki to keep track of recipes. It's one of four personal wikis that I keep as standalone HTML files in Dropbox, and edit with TiddlyDesktop on my Mac, or Quine on iPhone/iPad. I don't do anything sophisticated though: it's just one tiddler per recipe, mostly copied and pasted from the web. I've considered splitting them up to have each ingredient as a separate tiddler, but I don't think I've got anything like enough recipes to make it worthwhile.

Best wishes

Jeremy

--

Jeremy Ruston

jer...@jermolene.com

https://jermolene.com

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[Mark S.]

I use a simple TW app frequently for favorite recipes. Unfortunately, none of them are public domain.

Most of the recipes were just formatted by hand in Wikitext.

From the perspective of planning, what would be most useful (and I haven't quite achieved it) is to match recipes with ingredients you have on hand. I was starting on that process, but it's very tedious to break out ingredients for each recipe -- especially when there might be substitutions for those ingredients. So I usually just use the standard TW search.

The other thing, and I haven't worked this out either, would be to annotate recipes. If you look at any family cookbook, you're likely to see notes written all around the margin. Adjustments for different size batches, corrections, family reactions, etc. Maybe the new comment plugin could fill that niche.

I'm not sure if people are going to be interested in a random selection of recipes. I see that Amazon offers a free app with 130,000 public domain recipes! So what's really needed is the tools to break out recipes so they can be searched by ingredients without causing too much developer burnout.

-- Mark

[Jeff Wilson]

You're not going to have a lot of luck popularizing TW5 until the most common use cases do not require manually adding macros and widgets to the text. You'd also probably need to make the editor WYSIWYG, and provide buttons/menus and dialogs for adding those widgets.

[TonyM]

Thinking about recipes,

Any tiddlywiki recipe book should allow some images representing stains to overlay it :)

I have thought about this a few times, shoe horned a few recipes into a Get things done wiki but my larger interest is being about the concept of recipes as a metaphor or analogy for other knowledge sets from Work Instructions to specialist knowledge.

I see no reason not to enable a useful recipe edition of tiddlywiki via the addition of a number of sub-functions that can be used in other circumstances and applications. For example;

• Ingredients (lists)
• Test for ingredients
• Steps
• Organising recipes based on
• ingredients
• other parameters in a recipe eg season origin

I can imagine such features found in a good recipe could also be used to help someone build a network solution, software package or Holiday inventory.

but an open solution for food recipes would need another layer of refinement for the end user, to simplify and empower. I believe we the community can improve on this if we jointly develop some "user interface" standards and tools we can share, to take tiddly-wiki that step further to wider use. This is already starting in the Mobile first area.

Regards

Tony

[S. S.]

I wish Tobias had a recipe for Beer.

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Joe

The take-away for me is confirmation of what I know already :-)

Wider uptake will be "click-and-get-on-with-it" ... your wife is right. 

Most users are not interested in either coding applications or faffing about getting them running. They interested in delimited aims of specific apps dedicated to purpose "out-of-the-box".

Recipes are one of a thousand aims in life. 

THB an issue here is AUTHORS. Jermolene I think correctly comments his recipes for home are a small set. I think Mark S. comments on added value of ingredient values etc are correct to authoring a decent work of wider uptake that is matching or improving on what exists already. A major issue is if the writer is mainly into their subject deeply. Its (additional) work--and content providers are not that often the same as system providers.

Just thoughts

Josiah

On Sunday, 13 January 2019 20:37:29 UTC+1, Joe Armstrong wrote:

I was having a discussion with my wife about the TW -- I was saying how great it was and so on and how useful it would be for her to learn and use.

She was unconvinced - she said "only programmers are interested in things like this" ...

[bimlas]

Joe,

I wonder what your wife is saying about this? I've tried to create a navigation system that helps those who don't know how to use filters.

https://bimlas.gitlab.io/tw5-locator/

There is a cookbook in the sidebar, browse them and try the search engine (where there is also a Tags tab: if you want to get all results related to the selected tags, replace the search text with spaces, otherwise only those tiddlers will be listed which contains the text).