Tutorial not up to date: v0.6.1, missing significant UI changes

[SebastianHelm]

The tutorial http://ravichugh.github.io/sketch-n-sketch/tutorial/01.html describes v0.6.1. The current version v0.6.3 has a significantly different UI.

In general, it is possible to at least figure out where the described functionality now resides. However, there is no description for the new functionality, such as the new prominently located "Clean up" control.

[justinlubin]

Thank you for flagging this issue! We're actually working on (1) some pretty significant changes to the actual language used in Sketch-n-Sketch (changing to a more ML-style syntax and adding some new semantics), as well as (2) adding a lot of new core features dealing with direct output manipulation (significantly improved and more intelligent drawing tools) and (3) more bidirectional syncing/updating (but of a different flavor than our previous implementations). All three of these big changes are underway right now, so we're holding off a bit before writing any more documentation!

We plan on having a moment of "convergence" coming up sometime around the beginning of this summer, so that would be a good time to work on new documentation before starting on our next project.

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention, as documentation is always very important! :-)

[SebastianHelm]

Hello Justin,

Thank you for the nice reply. It seems people who work on graphics programs are nice people, since already had a good experience with Laszlo Korte, the developer of Reform, who made aware of Sketch-n-Sketch in the first place.

My scenario is very similar to the one Bret Victor plays out: Together with other scientists, I want to come up with graphics that best describe their findings. Given that there is already the challenge to quickly grasp what a bright mind spent years to understand, I need a program that does not distract me from discussing cutting edge science while I’m modifying the graphics. Therefore, and for Bret’s reasons, I feel that the procedural approach he presented works best. I first put my hope in Reform, since that appears to more closely follows that line. Unfortunately, though, it is not at a stage where it could be professionally used het, and Laszlo won’t be working on it anymore in the foreseeable future.

I am therefore wondering how much Sketch-n-Sketch is planned to serve Bret’s scenario of the scientist trying to find a new way to represent her data. If not, is there any way I can contribute toward making that happen?

Kind regards,

Sebastian

From: Justin Lubin notifications@github.com Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2018 07:49 To: ravichugh/sketch-n-sketch sketch-n-sketch@noreply.github.com Cc: Sebastian Helm github@s.helm.org; Author author@noreply.github.com Subject: Re: [ravichugh/sketch-n-sketch] Tutorial not up to date: v0.6.1, missing significant UI changes (#129)

Thank you for flagging this issue! We're actually working on (1) some pretty significant changes to the actual language used in Sketch-n-Sketch (changing to a more ML-style syntax and adding some new semantics), as well as (2) adding a lot of new core features dealing with direct output manipulation (significantly improved and more intelligent drawing tools) and (3) more bidirectional syncing/updating, but of a different flavor than our previous implementations. All three of these big changes are underway right now, so we're holding off a bit before writing any more documentation!

We plan on having a moment of "convergence" coming up sometime around this summer, and that would be a good time to work on new documentation before starting on our next project.

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[ravichugh]

Hi Sebastian --

Thank you for getting in touch, and for your interest in the project! Being able to help scientists, designers, and many other groups of users communicate ideas through graphics and visualizations is definitely the kind of thing we hope to help with... eventually.

So far, we've focused our efforts on situations where the user wants to and/or needs to work explicitly with the program. The program transformations that our user interface offers aims to reduce the amount of explicit programming required, but we are still a long way from completing hiding it from users, let alone coming up with an alternative representation for "ground truth" than code. That said, even in this "simpler" setting where code is the ground truth, there are tons of challenges in figuring out how to provide interactive assistance to help programmers/users design and build what they have in mind.

We'd be happy to chat more about these kinds of ideas.

Thanks, -- Ravi

[brianhempel]

Hey Sebastian,

I haven't played with them extensively so I can't say how production ready they are, but you might be interested in taking a look at Lyra and Data Illustrator. While neither has tons of programmatic functionality, if your data falls within their visualization domain they might be good fits.

Brian