zer0 wrote:The quietness of the forum when Don is away got me thinking: is it good that users can't contribute that much in terms of making things themselves and sharing them with other people who can take that creation and apply it in their XYplorer? There are scripts and an occasional file icon, but little else. Hopefully, when CTBs come into the picture we'll have some more graphical creations, but I hope that soon there will be more reasons to get creative and chip in.
P.S. Obviously, this post isn't meant to undermine contributions like j_c_hallgren's blog and jacky's wiki. My implications were more along the lines of software-related features.
Ah yes... don't ask what XY can do for you, ask what you can do for XY, eh?
But if Don's time off and the holidays aren't everything, the quietness you refer to is also probably due to members themselves. Before anything I want to make sure no one gets offended by what I will say, I obviously don't mean to offend anybody or undermine the time and work many spend in here helping others, etc
All I'm trying to say is just that, of course to have XY evolve requires Don, he is the almighty when it comes to this wonderful app, and there are no such things as plugins, themes or the likes (not that it is a bad thing mind you, things like themes have never been something I'm interested in, I tend to view them as pure bloat, especially in a file manager...)
But scripting already allows one to create wonderful and extremely powerful things, automate otherwise complicated, repetitive, long and boring tasks. It can add features to XY in many ways, and with the current state of scripting (including reading/writing, global vars, conditions, loops, etc) there is already an incredible amount of things one could (have XY) do, if one was so inclined.
Also, if you like XY and want to help the "project" as a whole, in doing something that will benefit the entire community, thus Don and of course yourself in the end, even if indirectly, you do not have to contribute on making the application itself better, let that to Don, he's the only one who can really do it anyways, and as he has proven so many times in the past years, he's the best at it!
That said, helping by contributing scripts is one way to help. But only one, and one of many. You don't have to be a scripter to help. (Again, this isn't directed at anyone and I know some already contribute plenty, I'm just throwing ideas out there!) This is not an open-source project, so no users can work on XY itself, but there are plenty of other ways that will contribute to the community, and so Don, and yourself. After all, helping XY can only motivates Don even more to spend countless hours working on it!
For example, one could make posts (e.g. in Tips & Tricks) about highlighting a lesser-known and yet oh-so powerful and useful feature of XY, introducing some of its unique features to newbies, tutorials on how to use this or do that, plenty of things that about anyone could do, since it could range from basics XY awesomeness to "advanced" scripting.
Same goes for the XYwiki, which as its name implies (hint: not the XY part
) is meant to be a user
s-contributed thing. It is not (only) a website for people to learn about XY, but one anyone can change, edit, improve. I personally couldn't care less about Dual Pane, but many seem to do. They've voiced their opinions repeatedly in the past, and eventually managed to create a nice proposal that eventually Don used to actually implement that feature into XY. And again, this is absolutely not directed at anyone, but now that XY does Dual Pane, no one is preventing any DP lover/addict to create a nice section "Dual Pane" on the wiki, presenting it, why it's so great, how it works in XY, ... to keep promoting it and help make it a (more) recognized/used feature, which could only be good and help XY & the community in the end. (And could even result in new ideas/features seeing the the light of day as a result...)
All I'm trying to say here is, there are already plenty of reasons and ways to get creative and contributes to the XY community, including I'm sure many we haven't thought of yet, so don't ask what you can do for XY, just pick one and do it!
Also, today we have scripts already, and tomorrow we'll also have those "snippets" Don mentioned already, so users have ways (and will have more of them in the future) of changing/improving/enhancing their XY!
Anyways, just my .02 and with that said, I'll stop "wasting time" here and I'm gonna go try and work on the wiki a little myself, as I've/it's indeed fallen so incredibly behind...
-jacky, still not dead yet.
