Hi, in developing my actually new project, I’m lucky to be supported by Digitalwanabe, who has definitely helped me understand Gamma much better, thxs to him.
But … I’m a lost cause—some things just don’t click at all…
Here is my feedback :
For me we’re missing a lot—really a lot—of general-level documentation.
All the help patches for a node are usually very specific. While a lot of care has been put into help patches, getting a big-picture understanding of an entire family of nodes or how to approach a project as a whole is not easy. Right now, we only get it in fragments, through examples, but something more general is missing. Some will say, “Read the Stride docs.” I think Gamma and its help patches should let me grasp the big picture without spending hours in complex, hardcoder-oriented documentation. After all, we’re in Gamma, with its own subtleties, going beyond the usual library usage.
This feedback is mainly to ask for clarification on best practices in Gamma. Often, on topics I struggle with—like mutability—I find hours of English videos (which I’m not comfortable with), online resources that aren’t always accessible, at least for me. Sometimes someone takes the time to convey the message in a sensitive way (because effective teaching must be sensitive), and that’s great. But it’s not enough.
What’s deeply missing in our wonderful Gamma is a support structure that helps with project design.
A more general level, proof by demonstration, but with a broad, project-oriented vision.
I’d love to see dummy projects showing best practices, for example, in long-term project development. Often, it turns out you can’t mix oranges and tomatoes or bananas… I’d like a dummy project showing how to build and manage a model. For instance, imagine the model as a building: in the building, an apartment; in the apartment, rooms; in the rooms, a table; on the table, a fruit bowl with oranges and bananas. And in another apartment, maybe a sound system and a glass of milk… For me, starting from a dummy project like this would be vague enough to be intuitively understood and easily adapted—whether for images, data, sound, or anything else. I’d like to see best practices for building this model, accessing it, and manipulating it.
Gamma lets me create managers anywhere I want, so I’ve been creating managers inside my models. I only recently realized that what manipulates the model—the functions that handle the model—should not be inside the model. With so much freedom in Gamma, anything is possible, and I ended up with very bad practices. Now, large parts of my project need revisiting because I don’t fully grasp the structuring.
It would help a lot if a few people could build a dummy project to show us all how to work ideally—with ReactiveX, channels, observables—but in a general way, not just for one or a few nodes.
So at the project design level.
Of course, this is meant as constructive feedback—at least, that’s how I feel after a full year of using Gamma. I hope it brings some nice fruit (and not just oranges and bananas)!