How to stimulate User Growth of TW?

#102

As someone who is just starting to play with TW and have started sharing the link around with friends, I think that the first major hurdle that TW needs to overcome is its design. The UI/UX looks like it was designed by programmers, not designers (I say that as a programmer myself, part of a team that has 40% just User Experience and Visual Designers).

It is, in my experience, when a professional designer takes wireframes (in our case, the app itself!) and does visual treatment that the apps suddenly gel and feel fresh and professional.

That applies also to the content on the homepage, etc.

Visual Designers have a different angle that even design-sensitive developers don’t. It’s the last phase that makes an app become a product.

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#103

I think the most basic thing most new users are going to want to do is to change the appearance of Tiddlywiki to make it their own. We tell folks to refer to the official documentation and most answers are there if you understand how to read it. But if you don’t, your brand new, and search tiddlywiki.com for “appearance” what you DON’T get is an explanation of the appearance tab in the control panel and how to use it. Many won’t even make it that far. They’ll search the empty download for “appearance” or “help” as you might have in a traditional application and not find anything. Many new users to any application if they can’t figure something out in a couple of minutes will simply abandon it and say it’s too hard. What is simple for an experienced user or intuitive for a computer professional is often not for casual users. Yes, the experienced users can and have built a huge amount of help resources but not having any help built into the default download makes the “sell” to new users far more difficult.

#104

I think you are right.

Just a comment, TT

#105

Most apps I’m familiar with don’t you let you change the appearance much under any circumstances.

If you type “appearances” into the search bar at tiddlywiki.com, the sixth entry under the “all matches” section is Customising TiddlyWiki’s user interface .

How much can you tweak wikimedia? Notion? Evernote? Pretty limited I’m guessing.

#106

Right.

Yet the recent “Layout” thing in TW really opens doors I think??

TT

#107

The empty download is a minimal build perhaps best left to experienced tiddlywiki users and has never being in my view useful for new users. I am building a personal notebook edition to demonstrate making editions that “users can make use of, out of the box”. Do have a look @PaulH and anyone else Personal Notebook — A TiddlyWiki Essentials Edition and tell me;

  • What you think?
  • What other missing information you think is essential to new users to “encourage adoption”
  • The various sidebar info tabs are in plane english words and if removed from the sidebar will be found with search.

This is my practical attempt to address possibilities raised this thread How to stimulate User Growth of TW?

I plan to post a link to a discussion on this edition shortly but I have had no feedback yet I am building an edition for the community - how do we handle this in Discourse

Essential Editions: Personal Notebook edition - development and feedback
#108

@TW_Tones
I had a look at your personal notebook. To be honest I think it looks a little too busy. I also asked myself, why would you want 2 favorite plugins and a rating macro. Select, what you like best - and in your explanation you can link to and explain about the other options. I am afraid it will be too crowded otherwise. Or if you want to be complete - maybe think of Thomas Elmigers MyStory plugin - the one with the bookmarks. tid.li Plugins — A TiddlyWiki Plugin Source
Nice to see you taking up this task.

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#109

Every Microsoft Office product lets you customize their appearance and layout most of which are now free. MS OneNote which is comparable to Tiddlywiki and Evernote has built in help, is free, and comes pre-installed on most Windows computers. It’s accessible via browsers, has phone apps, and auto-saves constantly to your Microsoft account auto-syncing with no setup. You go into the program hover your mouse over a light bulb that says “What do you want to do?” start typing and it just brings up the options, not instructions. Zero learning curve. That’s the competition with average computer users.

https://tiddlywiki.com/#Customising%20TiddlyWiki’s%20user%20interface needs specialized knowledge to be helpful a brand new person may not have.

#110

If the average computer user is happy using MS OneNote, why would they look for anything else?

#111

What got me to come over from MS OneNote was two things.

In OneNote exporting your data you’re limited to pdf or copy/paste both of which often loose formatting and layout because of how OneNote works. I’ve used the print to pdf option of a Tiddlywiki in my browser many times and never lost any of the visual formatting.

Second, OneNote doesn’t do dynamic data views such as what you can do with list filters or many of the transclusion options Tiddlywiki has. You can import from Excel but it doesn’t auto-update for example. I often demonstrated to others how much time can be saved with those options in Tiddlywiki.

For example, I use mine for a form of Bullet Journal. In a traditional hard copy Bullet Journal many people track things they do daily and make summary pages. That is done manually and can take a lot of time , but with Tiddlywiki I have summary tiddlers setup with tables and list filters which does the same thing but dynamically as I make changes to my individual journal entries saving a ton of time and effort. In other words, in a normal Bullet Journal it can feel like you are entering something twice or more but in my Tiddlywiki I only do it once. Again, this is something I couldn’t do in OneNote.

#112

Paul, you are correct

And help facilities extensive. However you need to keep one thing in mind. To get there you or your organisation have decided to opt into or subscribe to the Microsoft suite or cloud services and this is in itself a big decision based on a third party.

  • With tiddlywiki we do want to be somewhat independent of third parties.
  • Could we get the same outcomes without a commitment to third parties?

Perhaps you could consider proposing or publishing an Essential edition.

#113

I’ll hit one year of using Tiddlywiki everyday for my Bullet Journal in July. My intent is to have everything I’ve learned from the process about what works, what didn’t, and why posted by or around then if not sooner. What I’ve learned from this community has been a huge help to me and I’ll be happy to share as soon as I have it compiled. I don’t know if I would call it a full “Essential edition” but I have built a couple of custom things I’ll share and how I use some of the tools others here have built.

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#114

WYSWIG. I was disappointed when TW5 didn’t have it. But I thought it would be eventually added, possibly as an official plugin.

Today, every note-taking app offers WYSIWIG.

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#115

That is why I add my WYSIWYG plugin into TidGi’s default edition, I hope more people will know what TiddlyWiki can achieve on the first spot of TiddlyWiki.

The empty edition is “too empty” for new users (and maybe also for us old users, when we first met TW)

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#116

It’s interesting that this point was mentioned at the top of the thread but hasn’t been addressed much!

Speaking as a new user of TW, it feels a bit slow. A fresh empty.html responds quickly, but when you add enough plugins to get the functionality you want, the whole TW starts opening and saving tiddlers a bit slower.

Is this just an inherent limitation of TW being written Javascript? Or are there other optimizations incoming to increase performance?

I come from OneNote, and have a few years of notes saved in a single notebook, but pages still open as fast as before.

I’m exploring TW because I want a local, FOSS, privacy-friendly way to take notes and make Wikis.

I plan to explore logseq next, to see if it’s any faster/responsive than TW, and can still do what I need.

I agree that a built-in way to make a reasonable number of auto-saves would be great! I really like how TW is a single HTML file, and you don’t need to fuss around with installing a program to open it.

But in practice, having a saving mechanism that, for example, makes an autosave every 10 minutes, and keeps the 5 most recent ones, while also allowing you to make manual saves, would be perfect.

I’m using TiddlyDesktop right now, and making a new save for every single change seems like overkill. It’s also inflating my save folder to something like 500 MB, while the actual wiki file is only ~ 3 MB large.

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#118

Package it as an app available on all the major platforms and include a proper (read: seamless) syncing mechanism. I’ve been using Tiddlywiki for my entire adult life, and the thing that keeps me looking for and trying other options is the difficulty in getting Tiddlywiki to sync seamlessly between both my phone and laptop. Currently I use both Google Keep and Tiddlywiki, the former to jot down thoughts when out and about, or when I otherwise don’t have my laptop handy, and the latter to journal (expand upon thoughts I’ve had over the day, or week). It feels disjointed using two apps, but as it stands, Tiddlywiki doesn’t meet my needs by itself, due to the lack of a seamless user-friendly synching mechanism.

Yes I agree Tiddloid is a bit cumbersome. It would be nice if someone were able to integrate it all together, ie accessing and syncing a cloud hosted TiddlyWiki on the major platforms, Android / iOS / macOS / Windows / Linux . Where you would just sign-in to the app and you wouldn’t have to worry about saving. But this would require more time and development and I am not sure there is enough motivation for someone to devote to the necessary amount of development required.

Tiddloid still requires you to figure out sync. I use Dropbox as my primary sync mechanism, but I just use Tiddloid just to read my TiddlyWikis. I save the TiddlyWiki files to my SD card and if I need the most updated version, I just export from Dropbox.

#119

I think Tiddloid is by definition a library of device tiddlywikis. If you want cross device wiki’s you need other solutions or cooption of tiddliod is necessary.

tiddlyhost.com public or private TW directly from your device/desktop browser, or an iconised url/app from your home screen (I do this for talk.tiddlywiki.com) is one way of having a server hosted wiki right away.

With single file wikis shared across devices or people, you need a switch or check in/out process for which I have being “harping on about for years” and somewhat ignored for some reason. I have done a lot of research on this and believe it is possible, it just gets a little combinatorially complex, and not a one person job. Collaborate with me.

Concerned about periods with no internet access?, the default browser storage works and can be extended with Local Storage Plugin, cookies and local backups/save.

I do not think we have a technical problem but an implementation problem with saving/syncing.

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#122

I came to a similar conclusion recently. I’ve always liked the idea of org-mode, but every time I try to implement emacs I get really stuck in the setup mode. With TW the setup part is easier, config is easier. It’s got the typical problems of software: the more things it can do, the more complicated it typically is.

#124

Here is the beginning of a solution (warts and all): Basic customizing in TiddlyWiki - YouTube

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#125

As someone who has given birth (and who may or may not answer to “woman” depending on who’s calling and what they seem to think it means), I felt stopped in my tracks here. After I gave birth, I was DONE, so done. Totally worth it, yes. And… never gonna do it again. :slight_smile:

And I do wonder whether I would put myself through a learning-curve like TiddlyWiki if I were somehow starting again. I was lucky enough to grab it at a time when it was simpler (TW Classic, 2005), when browsers saved more readily, and when there was a free multi-user host (objectis) whose void has not really been filled in the time since its demise.

If we collectively had the resources to fund a Tiddlyhost-like site, such that tiddlywiki.com could offer a one-click “start here now” link for all curious visitors, that would be the easiest way to reduce friction, in my view.

Tell people that a local html is the old-fashioned way, and put node.js / server instructions within reach, but get them hooked on actually using the platform with ease, rather than squinting at their downloads directory.

Then, offer a bunch of example purpose-driven solutions to browse, from which folks can reverse-engineer most of what they need, and get a feel for what’s possible.

-Springer

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