Distractions are probably good, to a certain extent, in a promotional video. Not everyone that watches the video is going to want to take action immediately and start solving euler or investing in stocks or whatever else. Ideally, a promotional video should be fun enough that it can find its way through casually interested people to the seriously interested types. And, ideally, there will be enough information present that the serious types can find more (but that can go in the comments section).
Of course, nothing is ever completely ideal. The 15 minute video is long enough that a set of "skip to topic" links would probably be nice. That way people in a hurry can take a look and see if they want to watch something else instead. If people want to study, they should probably hit some of the existing documentation? For a promotional video we should instead, I think, focus more on issues of appeal than issues of satisfaction. But of course, there's plenty of space on youtube for satisfaction based videos, also. Thanks, -- Raul On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 4:54 PM, Murray Eisenberg <mur...@math.umass.edu>wrote: > A comment on Roger's comment as well as some comments on other aspects of > the video. > > (1) In fact, I find the sound background not just superfluous, but > distracting. (Yes, I know that's why we have a mute function on our > computers' sound controls.) > > (2) The background globe graphic is a bit distracting, too. Clearly _some_ > kind of background was needed for the horizontal scrolling banners; perhaps > just a plain background or a simple color gradient would be better. (I find > such irrelevant backgrounds akin to the sort of "chart junk" that Tufte > inveighs against.) > > (3) There's steep jump in code length from the couple of examples done in > immediate-execution mode to the scripts for the GUI examples. In fact, > looking at the quick scroll through the GUI code scripts, those not already > familiar with J might wonder why bother to learn a new language if the code > is still so long (unless they've coded enough to realize that in language > they already use, the code would probably be orders of magnitude larger). > > (4) The two GUI examples are quite nice! > > (5) Perhaps in place of one of the Euler contest problems, something > manipulating text would make the whole thing more meaningful to a larger > body of potential users. > > (6) Re Euler Problem 20: At first I found it surprising that the solution > involved converting !100x into a string, forming the list of characters in > that string, and then converting the characters to their digit equivalents. > That is, I was a bit surprised that the primitives didn't already provide a > facility for extracting the integer digits of an integer (or > generalizations to other bases). Have I forgotten something? > > (7) It would be useful if the video provide download links for the files > used in the GUIs (and, for that matter, script records of the > immediate-execution examples). > > > > On Fri, 7 Mar 2014 10:17:19 -0800, Roger Hui <rogerhui.can...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > V. nice. > > > > I note that the video basically does not make use of sound in the sense > the > > if you mute it, the information content is the same. The video > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs (Sudoku in APL, by John > > Scholes) has a different approach wrt sound. From what I understand the > > narration is difficult to do well and required lots of practice. > > > > > > > > On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 5:11 AM, Martin Saurer <martin.sau...@bluewin.ch > >wrote: > > > >> ...My two cents (or 15 minutes) to show what J can do. > >> > >> Feedback is welcome. > >> > >> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSJpJt3c11c> > >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSJpJt3c11c > > —— > Murray Eisenberg mur...@math.umass.edu > Mathematics & Statistics Dept. > Lederle Graduate Research Tower phone 240 246-7240 (H) > University of Massachusetts > 710 North Pleasant Street > Amherst, MA 01003-9305 > > > > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
