hi james.
i have to agree with pa that the tutorials are extremely difficult to understand / navigate. note, the tutorials themselves are fantastic, but discoverability, ux, ui, pedagogy all need some work in my opinion.
the current menu is problematic because there is no visual representation of state or history. i must admit, i spent a very long time with it all a couple of weeks ago before i realised what was happening - i.e., i ended up opening endless ‘new windows’ believing each one had many more tutorials in it, then thinking it was odd that i kept coming across the same types of tabs again and again. of course i am stupid, but you have to remember that everyone is stupid.
some basic quick changes which could help matters:
do not name the tutorials simply “Tutorial X” etc - have a little explanation in the title - basically the hover over annotation at the bottom doesn’t work here, should be in the button name; this will orientate the user better.
when one clicks on a tutorial button to open it, that clicked-on button must appear as highlighted, ‘current’ whilst open, i.e., feedback that yes, i have clicked this an now i am here.
however, i think really some bigger changes are needed. the whole tutorials and all the information is so huge and difficult to navigate, the user needs to have their hand held through the process. the example i can think of is the bach tutorials which are of a similar scope. when i go through those tutorials i am never ever in doubt as to which subject matter tutorial i am currently in, and in which section of it i currently am; and it is all just patch/window layout
Sadly, david zicarelli destroyed the usefulness of tabs with his max 7 rewrite, and in my experience, users simply do not notice them outside of a helpfile context, even experienced users. i think bach solves this.
I feel your pain on the max ref pages. the only way framelib params could be recognised is to create custom xml codes and somehow make new types, and then hope that the max ref system node js would then respect that. so i think that is a lost cause.
There is a lovely manuel poletti trick i have somewhere for faking the whole [onecopy] thing outside of the extras folder. i’ll dig it out for you if you want.
As i said, the body of documentation work in framelib is outdone only by the body of alex’s objects. it would just be a shame to not more clearly guide a new user to the relevant parts to find a way into it all.
pete .
My main point is simply that the more focused the sugegestions issues the more likely something changes (I wasn’t really sure what outside of ui/ux/pedagogy was left that might have been got right).