iphone, animation

15 Answers

• Accepted Answer

  First things first - the title

  Set the title. Make it descriptive. But not too long. Your titles the first impression others will have.

  Got Code?

  If you have code you need reviewed, please be considerate of crappy looking web pages when you paste your codes. Also, make sure you use the special wiki-formatting (called Markdown) when you paste your code. It's really super easy. No excuses for bad pastes. Here's how. Just start and end your code with the ~ mark - three times. Look over to the right on the sidebar (near the bottom) and you'll see an example.

  Got lots of Codes?

  If you got more than a few lines of code or log output - please, for the love of God - please don't paste it here. Please use Gist or Pastie for your code snippets. It will be so much easier to read, fork and comment.

  Tags

  Please tag your posts – and separate them with commas. For example:

  iphone, animation
  

  Your tags are also a way that others can find your post and also a better way of classifying content. If you post good tags, the community will love you for it.

  Vote!

  Not quite American Idol, but your vote still counts - especially around here. If you vote up (or down if it sucks), it will help you get more attention and more attention means better answers.

  Lend a hand

  We give and take. More takers than givers. Do your share if you can and try and help out. The earth will love you for it and we will too.

  Close up shop

  After you ask a question and get answers, please mark the best answer - assuming you have one. Once you mark an answer at the best, you'll both get Appcelerator reward points and it will help others find quality content.

  Be courteous

  Nobody likes a prick. Take a deep breath. Ask your question clearly and post a reduced test case, if possible. If you're answering a dumb question, consider that maybe it's a n00b question and that's OK - we all do it from time to time. You gotta start somewhere.

• If I can add to that, It's good practice to thank members that help you out.

  • it confirms to all that their suggestion works and
  • it encourages folks to help each other out

• Also, its a good idea when a problem is sorted, to close them or mark them as resolved.

• There doesn't seem to be a way to edit questions once you've posted them — this is something I definitely do on Stack Overflow and would love the ability to do so here as well.

• we have pushed some fixes this morning to improve the ordering of answers.

  the ordering is now in the following:

  • best answer is always first
  • highest votes are next
  • chronological (newest first) are third

  The goal here is to make sure that if the answer has been marked "best" by the person who asked the question - that that answer will always been on top and be highlighted. The second goal is to make sure that even if a best answer hasn't yet been chosen, that the ones with the highest community votes will rise to the top. In the case there are no votes, the latest answers will then go up.

  We'd like to encourage community voting as a way to encourage better answers between peers and rankings.

  The model we're following is very similar to Stackoverflow which works quite well. Since this is a new capability, it will take a little bit of time to work through some of the issues and get the system trained a bit and the correct behaviors working.

  So why do this on our own? For the past 3 years, we've had now about 4 different forum systems. They all have had major issues for us mainly and none of them allowed us to do what we really want to do here. So, we tried to make it work with off the shelf and we haven't. We're now going to try and make it work ourselves so we can customize things the way we need to. Also, we're planning on a bunch more integrated capabilities here soon and we needed the ability to control how things workflowed for that reason.

  Please bear with us…

• To add:

  Try to search for an answer before asking a question ;)
  And don't take offence when someone just points you to another post where you solution most likely is.
  Though this might not give you the exact code and answer you were looking for, you'll often find that you will learn a lot more as you find out what it was you needed to learn. :)

  If you see a question you can answer, try to find the time to answer and help a dev' out! ;) Remember, we were ALL noobs once! :) - And it's always good karma. (You never forget those who teach you things)

• The forums don't appear to be updating at the moment. The newest post being displayed is almost a day old; I know I've posted things more recently than that! :)

  In order to encourage proper use of Markdown, it would also be super-useful to have a "preview" function before you submit a question.

• Wow my spelling and punctuation sucked in my post… Now if there was only an "Edit" button… Argh.

• Answered my own question… semms like Ad-Block plus blogs the Ask a Question box…

  Note to Appcelerator web designer:

  Don't give the boxes a class of "sidebar_ad" if you want it to show for users who use Ad-Block (there are many of them)

• Thanks Dana. We fixed the sidebar ad issue. Also, you should be able to edit posts now.

• I find this new forum really dreadful to navigate. The "Most Recent" section shows new questions, but I don't see any way to find which old questions have new answers. I don't see a way to limit a search to a tag or small set of tags, so my searches often come up with a whole bunch of messages irrelevant to what I'm looking for.

  And, worst of all, answers to a question aren't sorted in any manner I can divine. They're certainly not chronological, or even reverse chronological. In this very thread I see a bunch of "answer 2 weeks ago", followed by a couple "answered 6 days ago", followed by "1 week ago". In other threads I've seen even more confusing ordering. It's impossible to track a conversation as one person replies to another reply.

  [Edit: Case in point for ordering – When I posted it, this message ended up in the middle of the list of answers, sandwiched between "6 days ago" and "1 week ago". What's it doing there?]

  Support forums are more than simple responses to questions. People comment on the answers as well. I think the Q&A model isn't what people want. They want some way to have actual conversations.

  This is a solved problem. There are lots of good forum software packages available. PLEASE use one of the existing ones, don't try to write your own.

• this new forum is not really businesslike
  no categorization, and only the last threads …
  give us an punbb or phpbb !

• Now this may be a really obvious question but where they hell do I ask questions? I can't find any button that says "Ask Question" or the like…

  On a side note, the forums on the old doc site we're much more logical for this sort of thing. I think the Q&A is neat but not as useful as having a real dedicated forum.

• But it's still missing the point. Your message is obviously a reply to mine, but even with the new ordering tweaks you still can't tell that. Someone new to this thread would have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, since there's nothing to indicate what you're replying to.

  If you want to promote the "best" answer and the highest votes to the top of the list, fine. Do so. But mark them as such, and don't remove them from the chronological flow. Yeah, that means they show up both at the top of the list, and later in the chronological section. At least someone new to the thread can figure out what's going on.

  None of this address the fact that people will be responding to responses, not just to the question at the top of the thread. It simply doesn't make sense for either your response to me, or this response to your response, to be voted up. This discussion isn't an "answer" to a "question", it's a conversation. It needs to be viewed in chronological order to make any sort of sense.

  BTW, we also need a preview button to make sure we've done the Markdown properly. And voting doesn't work; I voted your post up to 1, then down again. It went to -1, not 0. There's apparently no way for me to simply rescind my vote.

• Yeah, I'm not missing the point. I'm simply trying to convey to you that we're working on it and it's not something we can address 15 minutes after you post your complaints. What I'm saying is that (a) we hear you and we're working on improving that – incrementally and (b) give me a few days to a week to make those improvements. We have a long list of improvements - a lot of which you're complaining about - coming soon.