Saturday, February 23, 2013

Boa Constructor Frustrating No User Tutorial Support

After doing some research about Boa Constructor, I found Riaan Booysen was the founder and developer of Boa Constructor. Here is an article written Friday, August 15th, 2003 in the Linux Magazine about Riaan Booysen and Boa Constructor.
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/1430/

No User Support For Boa Constructor
Here is the mailing list for Boa Constructor.
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=1909

You will find there are a lot of people asking questions. But they receive little and at most times no supportive replies.

To be honest, I have been hesitant in writing Boa Constructor tutorials due to the lack of tutorials on the internet. This brings to mind questions:
  • Why aren't Boa Constructor users writing tutorials to help new users?
  • Are they being protective of what they have learned, the hard way?
  • Or is Boa Constructor just a dud (hopelessly bad)?

Paranoia sets in with conspiracy theories that those fluent in Boa Constructor, don't want others to learn how to use it because of it's simplicity and GUI (Graphical User Interface) programming potential.

Unfortunately if users don't promote Boa Constructor and don't provide tutorials on the internet. This shows a lack of interest in the project and results in the demise, or to be blunt the death of the project.

It's like the old Economics rule Supply and Demand: If there is no demand, supply will be reduced or even worse stopped. But if there is a great demand, then the supply will be increased.”


Give Your Support To Boa Constructor
My final conclusion is, if you want support in how to use Boa Constructor, you need to write tutorials on how to use Boa Constructor. If people start writing tutorials about Boa Constructor and provide them freely (Open Source),  they will encourage a greater interest in the project and possibly rekindle the efforts of those who started the project. This could give the project a breath of life and result in new updates, patches, plugins and more.

Learning How To Code In Boa Constructor
So to get the ball rolling and develop interest in the project, I will explain how I learned to use Boa Constructor.

Here is the evolutionary process (learning curve) I went through:
  • Learned how to use Python IDLE.
  • Searched the internet for tutorials and Watched a lot of videos on Youtube about Python and wxPython.
  • When I stumbled upon Boa Constructor, I wanted to jump right in and build GUI's straight away (Yes!, I was impatient)

After 2 years, I can create simple to medium GUI's, but now I realise, I need to learn and understand more advanced Python programming code and styles.

What helped me the most in learning how to write code in Boa Constructor was by searching for tutorials about wxPython and it's various widgets. That's because Boa Constructor uses wxPython widgets to create GUI's.

Have your say – Add a comment
I would really appreciate your thoughts about, the lack of User Support for Boa Constructor. Have your found any Boa Constructor tutorials on the internet? 

3 comments:

  1. Hi Daryl,
    While looking for a GUI/IDE builder for my RaspberryPi I did look at Boa Constructor and yes apart from the ShowMe video tutorials there is very little out there. Evenetually I settled on Lazarus/FPC for my project which I did succesfully build but there does seem a lot more help out there for Lazarus and Free pascal. However I am comeing back to look again at Python and a suitable GUI builder and your Video tutorial #1 was very instructive and helpful and has re-invigerated my interest in Boa. I look forward to your next video. Regards Mark

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  2. Hi Daryl. I just found your page and video on Boa Constructor today, about a year after you posted it. I was a little surprised that you are reporting at that time "Frustrating No user tutorial support" for Boa, because since 2000, there has been a) a pretty nice written tutorial in Boa Constructor itself by Kevin Gill, then an update in 2007 for the most current version of Boa by Werner Bruhin, and then in b) Feb 2009 I posted a 12 video tutorial series on "An Introduction to Boa Constructor" on ShowMeDo.com, which is the first hit on Google. It's a big program and there is more that can be shown in tutorials, but the basic tutorials are out there. More should be added, though, so it's good to see there is still interest in this great application. Thanks for getting involved!

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  3. BTW,
    https://bitbucket.org/cwt/boa-constructor
    is the more recent home, where others the Riaan are now maintaining it...

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