Hi everyone,
For someone who doesn't have any background knowledge on scripting, would you say that it is helpful/necessary to learn the language of HTML, CSS and Javascript in order to go in depth with OSC ?
Or OSC is not using the entire same language ?
To tell the truth, the documentation seems to be for someone who has at least some knowledge about those mentioned languages which makes it difficult (not impossible) for a beginner to get started.
At least having shared templates were more useful to look at than the documentation.
An example I'm seeing on the documentation is about "Writing a custom module":
Described as:
Using the server's
custom-moduleoption, users can load a custom javascript module that filters incoming and outgoing OSC / MIDI messages
Then immediately we see:
// Do whatever you want
// initialize variables
// declare functions
// load modules
// etcmodule.exports = {
init: function(){ // this will be executed once when the osc server starts }, oscInFilter:function(data){ // Filter incoming osc messages var {address, args, host, port} = data // do what you want // address = string // args = array of {value, type} objects // host = string // port = integer // return data if you want the message to be processed return {address, args, host, port} }, oscOutFilter:function(data){ // Filter outgoing osc messages var {address, args, host, port, clientId} = data // same as oscInFilter // return data if you want the message to be and sent return {address, args, host, port} }, unload: function(){ // this will be executed when the custom module is reloaded },}
Cool, but what is even the meaning of:
module.exports,
oscInFilter:function(data){
oscOutFilter:function(data){
unload: function(){
Again this is an example but this is how the documentation is mainly built.
What would be great is to have a documentation which is explaining everything clearly by using simple words that we all human can understand, at least to get started.
Having little examples either into a template or short videos of what is explained on the documentation or making it just more simple to everyone would be extremely beneficial, a time saver and stress free.
For instance:
I am pretty sure that most of us wanted to make a text bigger when we created one of our first widgets, it wasn't intuitive to find out how to do it for a beginner.
However, if it was well explained somewhere it would have been so much better to explain as follow:
To make a text bigger or smaller:
Go on the CSS section and write in
font-size:#% and replace "#" by a number between 1 to 100.
This way is simpler and easy for everyone to understand.
I don't know how you guys are doing to stay quiet about this, maybe you are all genius but I am definitely not one.
Anyway, the only way to go for me now is to learn the hard way, which is time consuming and nerve wracking but once I'll become more advanced, I will think about re-creating a documentation for everyone to understand as soon as they enter the OSC world.
Please understand that this message has nothing to do about how OSC works and what OSC can do/cannot do or a complain against @jean-emmanuel (who is doing an excellent job here at helping us as much as he can).
Now, I'm just trying to find out how to make OSC user friendly to everyone out there, especially for people who don't have the web language in their brain.
Now going back to my main question:
For someone who doesn't have any background knowledge on scripting, would you say that it is helpful/necessary to learn the language of HTML, CSS and Javascript in order to go in depth with OSC ?
All the best,
Swayrian
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