Please read (I feel this could be important for all) First of all apologies and explanation: My work currently has 3 levels of priority 1/ work that keeps my company going 2/ work for the FB list as a whole 3/ work on my FB projects (The positions of 2 & 3 may change in 99...) Our studio has just taken on a mass of work for december which means that posts 2 & 3 are slipping. So I have put 3 on hold... Roadmap & Coordination Having met with Alain from PixMix here in France, we decided to do all we could to contribute to making FB easy to get into (I hasten to say that although PixMix is a commercial company distributing FB is not it's principal activity, nor is it at the moment profitable for the company - Alain did this in order to contribute to the 'barn-raising' spirit of helping Staz - and it is in that spirit that I work with him). This involves: * gathering together resources for FB, * trying to get things to the level that we would have liked to find when we started with FB, * once things are together - translating to french. You have seen practical results of this in the FB FAQsheets. But we have other projects currently underway: * building a FB resouce site 'code-named the Ultimate FB resource site or 'ultimate' for short, * create a registry of FB apps, source code, and coders, * cleaning up the list archives to reduce the correspondance to indexed Q&A form, * more FAQsheets and in the jotbook we have: * compile a registry of Toolbox headers, with indexing and sample code * clean up the Functions library help file and perhaps complete it, * start an FB e-zine, with attached FB shareware, * discuss with Frank the possibility of doing something from his books. The secondary purpose was that as the resources were implemented we posted to available outlets of info, in order to increase the visiblity of FB in the programming world. (If folks suddenly saw lots of resources coming online for FB, perhaps we could counter all the noise that RealBASIC is currently getting, and recover folks interested in a 'basic' programming lanaguage). As you can see from these postings, and some recent posts on the list (Rick, bbird, Sylvain...) we are now getting into a situation of possible 'duplication' of resources. We didn't speak earlier as we didn't want to promise and then not deliver, so the FAQsheets (as number 1) were only announced as they were ready to go public, the others we only cleared with Bill beforehand. We wanted firstly to ensure that any postings stayed in the spirit of the list, and secondly to use Bill as a clearing house to avoid duplication of work, supposing that others would also clear propositions with Bill too. Now we have gone public. Bill has given us permission to use the [FAQ] tag on mail, in order that folks can filter out mail if they don't want it, but it would seem that things are going slightly beyond that. So here is the proposition: * we avoid duplicating our efforts as far as possible * Those that are already doing something, coordinate the efforts amongst themselves and only post to the list when: - there is a call for volunteers - there is a new resource available - there is important info to communicate * we use the tag [COORD] (or anything similar) for activities coordinating efforts to improve the FB resources available. Thus, those who are not interested can filter the mails out. Concretely: I'll contact Sylvain, Rick, bbird privately. If anyone else is currently preparing resources for FB, then mail me privately. Then I'll post the current state of projects to those interested and hope that they'll do the same, and then we divide up the work to the best of our ability, and available time. Looks like 99 could be a wonderful year for FB. All the best to all the best jonathan