When one browses to MindMeister and looks at the nicely designed page, the user will notice a nice screenshot of the service. This is not a screenshot, but an anonymous, live embedding of the actual mind mapping service. Right at the first page, you get to start messing around with things. I think all Web 2.0 apps need to provide this kind of immediate use. We can provide such a low barrier to use, with no installation, but we've really lowered the bar, so to speak. The users won't jump very high for us these days. Let them trip and fall right into our arms.
At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful
Comments