perceived status of TW as project - actively maintained or not?

[han...@gmail.com]

The recent comments about the public perception of TW being outdated
are of course inaccurate. For those of us already cognizant of the
value it provides, we're more than happy to employ kludgey workarounds
like portable Firefox to get that value.

However for those of us trying to get other, perhaps less technical
people to adopt our TW-based solutions, it is true that the lack of
support for modern browsers reflects poorly on the project, and
affects the client's perception of our recommendation and therefore
ourselves.

All FOSS projects with plugins/modules/extensions suffer from the
unreliability of the add-on developers, and only a subset continue to
be kept current and viable over the long term. However it is IMO
**critical** to a project's overall success that the **core** be well
maintained, so at least the basic functionality offered by the
software is available to users with "normal default" platform
requirements.

It's true that Chrome and FF's rapid update cycle, coupled with the
fact (I assume?) that JavaScript isn't as well "standardized" as say
HTML/CSS have created a game-changingly different reality for
browser-based application platforms, but the fact is that we all must
adapt ourselves to Reality as it presents itself to us.

In the world of FOSS, every developer has their own itch to scratch
and we mere users without the skills to contribute to the project's
development don't have the right to complain about what is so freely
given to us. But of course that doesn't stop us from acting as if we
were paying customers, and that is also part of the reality of FOSS.
So please forgive me for speaking my opinion forthrightly, and
understand my strong feelings are the result of my fervent admiration
for Tiddlywiki; I am truly grateful for the inspiration it has offered
me so far.

Bottom line: TW's ability to interact with external programs, remote
storage, synchronization, version control, all these things are
important I'm sure to many of TWs users (=customers). However, if
development time and attention are devoted to such accessory
functionality at the expense of the core being kept compatible with
modern browsers, I personally fear for the mainstream viability of the
project as a whole.

[Jeremy Ruston]

Thanks for the comments Hans. I've already announced elsewhere that I
am now working on TiddlyWiki again. I've been working on the build
tools, which might sound non-essential, but actually is key: the
difficulties with developing and publishing TiddlyWiki have slowed
things down in the past. Once that's done, I plan to address the
browser compatibility issues.

I'll continue to talk about progress in [twdev], and will announce any
big milestones in [tw].

Best wishes

Jeremy

--
http://jermolene.com
http://tiddlywiki.com
http://osmosoft.com

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group.
> To post to this group, send email to tiddl...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tiddlywiki+...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en.
>

[passingby]

On Friday, December 9, 2011 3:13:50 AM UTC-5, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

Thanks for the comments Hans. I've already announced elsewhere that I
am now working on TiddlyWiki again.

I am so glad to hear this and this surely shall provide an immense fillip to whole tw development world.
 

[HansBKK]

Thanks so much for a perfect answer Jeremy. May I suggest that something addressing this issue be posted to the main website, perhaps even mentioned and linked to in/from "Hello There"?

And just to show my hubris knows no bounds, here's my top wishlist item in the "external tiddler" family, I think it's pretty "low-hanging fruit" with a huge series of follow-on benefits:

I imagine something in core that would allow for the flexibility of these guys from Eric:

• CreateTiddlersFromCSV
• TemporaryTiddlersPlugin

with feature/UI ideas from these as well

• ImportTiddlersPlugin
• LoadTiddlersPlugin

I'm currently on a kick of "plain text rules", not only for future-proofing the data itself, but also in line with the *nix philosophy

• Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
  
• Write programs to work together.
  
• Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Beyond the immediate benefits of data sharing, replication, version-control, accessibility to your-local-toolset progs and script etc, any database/server-based solution can obviously work with plaintext, so that's a "multi-engine" path from core to server-based even before implementing a plug-in architecture for data-storage.

Enough enough I know I know. . .

And thanks again for your game-changing contribution to open-source knowledge management. . .

[HansBKK]

Whoops sorry forgot these two from the same nuclear family:

http://www.TiddlyTools.com/#ExportTiddlersPlugin
http://www.TiddlyTools.com/#SaveAsPlugin

[Eric Weir]

On Dec 9, 2011, at 10:55 PM, HansBKK wrote:

And just to show my hubris knows no bounds, here's my top wishlist item in the "external tiddler" family, I think it's pretty "low-hanging fruit" with a huge series of follow-on benefits:

When I click on that link, Hans, I'm sent to the top-level Google Groups page. Or is something like that you "top wish list item"?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Eric Weir

eew...@bellsouth.net

"The invincible shield of caring

Is a weapon sent from the sky 

against being dead." 

- Tao Te Ching 67

[HansBKK]

On Monday, December 12, 2011 5:46:31 PM UTC+7, Eric Weir wrote:

When I click on that link, Hans, I'm sent to the top-level Google Groups page. Or is something like that you "top wish list item"?

Maybe because I'm using the "new GoogleGroups" interface? I don't know another way to reference it directly:

You can Google

"IMO we should let people use the version control & distribution implementation they prefer"

Here's a good maillist archive interface outside Google:

http://www.mail-archive.com/tiddl...@googlegroups.com/msg20271.html