Hi Carlos, Comments inline..
On 12/29/17, 5:21 PM, "[email protected] on behalf of Carlos Rovira" <[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]> wrote: >Hi, > >thinking about all of this this days...to be honest my point of view is to >release a cool image (website and more) of Royale as soon as we have the >most usable product. > >I think we don't have yet and for that reason (and due to a ton of work) I >didn't make more progress. > >My fear is that putting a near final website make people come and try >Royale, and after much problems to find the way to work they'll find a >technology that still is not ready for making production Apps. > >Sorry if this is very hard and rude to say in this way, but doing that >will >make the opposite effect that we want. I agree with what you say. What I am suggesting is making enough changes to the site to attract people who can help us create a "most usable product". I don't think we have enough people to do that as fast as I'd like, so I'd rather tweak what you have to do what I see in many shopping centers: a sign goes up saying that Store XX is coming soon and they are hiring. Only later does that sign come down and they have a grand opening. Similarly, I would like to tweak enough of what you have to say that we need "pioneers" and folks who like the bleeding-edge. Even one or two more folks who can work well with others would be great. I haven't gone through every page you've done, but on the main page, I think we only need to change the NPM section in some way. > >From the beginning I was with you all in making a strategic change of >name, >website, and more, but my idea was to have work towards and very usable >product and one that has enough tools out of the box to make Applications >quick and ready in a similar way Flex does. But I think we are not there >yet. > >But I don't want to stop any initiative and if you decide to publish the >website this days, I can make the changes you considere and export an >static version. > >Regarding website royale version, I'd prefer to spend hours of development >in making a full set of components ready to make an Application instead of >trying to replicate something that I did thinking on remove the effort of >the team to make exactly that, but again, I see you all very decided to do >that so we must do what majority dictates. > >My vision is that we always could do that, but this is not the time. >People >coming to Royale will want to try Royale and make some basic things, add a >button, a TextInput, a slider, and something similar...if what they gets >is >not what they expected...they will go away and never will come, and worst >of all, those guys will say nothing good about royale....and most >important, they will never know what we did the website, since is not >important... > >What I try to say is that website is not important to us. Is only >important >to sell Royale to the world, to the community > >The UI Set is important, how they look and what it could do is important. >If that is not ready....our community will be of us and few more, but no >body will come to join us in our quest. > >Again, maybe what I try to say here is hard to listen, but believe me, I >only try to warn about what people want for us and if we don't give what >they want, this project will be another js framework that will never >compete with the technologies like Angular or React. > >If you get UI set, Forms, Validation, and the rest of things we had in >Flex, people will join us, and you'll always could work and make the >Royale >website with Royale to complete what the technology can do. One reason for my mockup of the website in MXML was to make sure folks truly understood the power of the extensible component model for Royale. You are still focused on traditional interactive Applications, and I agree that migrating Flex apps is a key market for us, but you also seemed to be interested in folks creating new projects, and I wanted to illustrate that Royale, with MXML and an extensible component model can be a benefit there too. I may be crazy, but I believe that Royale can be useful in many more places than what folks think of as traditional Applications. I still think we want to use Royale to produce our web site some day (which doesn't have to be now). In mocking up the site, I realized there might be content in your proposed site that is not ALv2 compatible, so I am suggesting changing that now, otherwise, it may be much more noticeable the day we want to cut over to the Royale version of the site, since the Royale version will probably have to release-able as an Apache release. I'm in no hurry to switch over to the Royale version of the site. I just want us to take a few minutes here and there to continuously improve it. I still don't know where the line is between theme and content, but if the colors and fonts aren't part of the theme and you can tell us what you used, we can make sure the fonts will be ALv2 compatible and the Royale mockup will look a little better. Meanwhile, you've been saying for a few months now that you want a better UI set, but really, I have no idea what work needs to be done when you say that. I don't doubt that there are bugs and missing features in our UI set, but IMO, we are not staffed with a QA team nor are we staffed to do things for "completeness". We pretty much just try to do what potential users ask for on the mailing list. Priority is given for folks migrating Flex apps. Someone asked for modules so I put together basic modules. Someone asked for a TreeGrid, Peter put one together. Harbs put something in about Validation. Someone asked about I18N, I showed a way to do that. If you want to migrate an app (even Tour de Flex) and can show us specifically what is broken, we'll try to fix it (or better yet, help you fix it). Of course it would be better if we could match Flex 4.6, but I'll be happy if we can approximate Flex 1.0. That's where it all started. And Flex 1.0 didn't have modules or I18N or a TreeGrid. IMO, we have to be clever and smart about where we spend our energy and time and continuously improve and continuously try to recruit new people. We can't be like a corporation with a fixed staff that builds something with limited public input and then launches it. > >I'll wait to help with one way or another, but I'm starting to think that >maybe we all have different things in mind of what royale could be in the >next few months or in a more far future... I hope we do have different things in mind. I know my mind does not have all of the answers. We need good ideas from different people, including yourself. We have this mailing list to try to get some level of mutual understanding, but folks are still free to scratch their own itch. We don't even need to all agree, we just have to try to not get in each other's way, and try to help folks succeed in scratching their itch if it makes sense. So, I don't know how much time you have, but in summary my requests of you would be (in order): 1) Make some tweaks to the site to try to recruit more committers instead of users 2) Tell us the colors and fonts used on the site and whether you chose those colors and fonts or whether they are part of the theme 3) Replace ET-Line font in your version of the site or show us that it is ALv2 compatible 4) Try to build something with Royale so you can be more specific about what is missing/broken. Maybe you could try to make our ASDoc example look and work better. That might expose some things the UI set needs that is more tangible. I pretty much agree that we don't want to give users the impression that Royale is a UI set that is the equivalent of React before it is, but I think we need to get a release out soon and try to establish a workflow where we can release more often, so we can continuously improve the releases. And the UI set probably won't be as ready as you would like it in these first releases. I just think we need to do that in order to try to attract one or two more committers to help us make a better UI set, and attract one or two more users who are willing to ride a bumpy road with us so they can be a testimonial to attract other users and slowly build up momentum. I don't think we can make big leaps. My 2 cents, -Alex >
