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Tips & Tricks

Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2016 5:50 am
by mike
Folks,

I want to make a series of short GIF clips to show some useful stuff inside Nimble Commander.
Think it can be a good way to explain some not obvious features of NC, which can make life easier (hopefully :)) if used.
Since that's a quite boring work, I plan to make one clip per week, currently there're two of them to see:
http://magnumbytes.com/wiki/Tips_%26_Tricks

Although, as always, your opinion might help me to move in the right direction:
- Do you think such short clips may be helpful?
- Is that format appropriate?
- What topics should be covered first?

Mike.

Re: Tips & Tricks

Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2016 2:28 pm
by sasha
Hi Mike,

good idea, it instantly reminded me of the demonstrations at https://www.sublimetext.com/ . Some quick thoughts:

- GIF doesn't look great. Look at how crisp the animations are at sublimetext.com
- Maybe put the best use cases more prominent on the main website (in addition to the forum)
- I would shorten the text to 1-2 sentences, the animation should be more or less self-explanatory
- Don't display all on one page, too much moving things (visual noise)
- Use similar configuration for use cases. Currently, the windows have different toolbar settings, different horizontal separation, ...
- Only one use case per animation. In the second one (hard filtering), the navigation and marking are maybe not necessary.

Cheers,
Sasha

Re: Tips & Tricks

Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2016 2:48 pm
by darek
A propos Sublime Text: I remember they've actually made a blog post about the technology behind their videos. Here it is:

http://www.sublimetext.com/~jps/animate ... d_way.html

But I think the idea is very good. Anything to show off the power of NC is great. I'm with Sasha though, that having too many videos playing on the page at the same time is somewhat confusing. Either some way to pause them or having them in different pages/tabs would do well.

Actually, after second read, everything Sasha wrote is spot on! :)

Re: Tips & Tricks

Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2016 10:33 am
by mike
Hi guys!

Thanks for feedback!
sasha wrote: - GIF doesn't look great. Look at how crisp the animations are at sublimetext.com
Yep, that's an effect of video compression that happens before the actual GIF is made.
I thought it won't be that visible, but since you've pointed it out - I have just found another way of screen capturing, without a compression loss.
A kick from outside is a great solution against laziness :D
sasha wrote: - Maybe put the best use cases more prominent on the main website (in addition to the forum)
Surely, however, I think there should be at least 8-10 of such clips, before publishing on the main website.
sasha wrote: - I would shorten the text to 1-2 sentences, the animation should be more or less self-explanatory
- Don't display all on one page, too much moving things (visual noise)
- Use similar configuration for use cases. Currently, the windows have different toolbar settings, different horizontal separation, ...
- Only one use case per animation. In the second one (hard filtering), the navigation and marking are maybe not necessary.
Good points, will try.
Don't know how to split those clips in Wiki - different page for every Tip is a bit overkill, and manually inserting some vertical space between them in single page might look odd.
darek wrote: A propos Sublime Text: I remember they've actually made a blog post about the technology behind their videos. Here it is:
http://www.sublimetext.com/~jps/animate ... d_way.html
Yeah, I've read that blog post, but decided to go in a more conservative way, since that web page design and scripting is a somewhat black magic for me :)

Re: Tips & Tricks

Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2016 10:40 am
by darek
Here's something I googled quickly: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/on-click-animated-gif/

I have no idea how complex/viable this is, but the idea to play GIFs only after a click sounds good in principle. Just my 2c.

Re: Tips & Tricks

Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2016 10:45 am
by mike
darek wrote:Here's something I googled quickly: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/on-click-animated-gif/
I have no idea how complex/viable this is, but the idea to play GIFs only after a click sounds good in principle. Just my 2c.
Hmm, that sounds great!
I'll check if it's possible to make MediaWiki engine behave the same way or somehow embed that code on the page.

Re: Tips & Tricks

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2016 4:46 pm
by mike
Quick update on topic:
I've added a third T&T: Soft Filtering with Key Modifier, and previous ones were rebuilt with better quality.

Playing GIFs on click is still an open question, although.
Currently, as a variant, sections of that page are collapsed by default.

Re: Tips & Tricks

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2016 6:27 am
by mike
Another one was added: Editing of Remote Files:
http://magnumbytes.com/wiki/Tips_%26_Tr ... mote_Files

Re: Tips & Tricks

Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2016 3:41 pm
by mike
Here's another one - Overlapped Terminal usage:
http://magnumbytes.com/wiki/Tips_%26_Tr ... d_Terminal

Re: Tips & Tricks

Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2016 6:12 am
by mike
After some hiatus, here's the new clip: Opening of an Arbitrary Archives.
http://magnumbytes.com/wiki/Tips_%26_Tr ... y_Archives