[Bf-committers] Blender Developer Sneak Peeks in the release logs (2.70 and beyond)

[Thomas Beck]

Hi friends,

In short
----------------------
Today I'd like to propose smth.: To add a section to our release logs with
the sneak peek videos for the 2.70 series that I released once a week for
every Blender release.

You can see the playlist for the current version here (every new version
gets a new playlist)
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfceNesfWvLUCsnw1DR2Oup8hFw5z6SB2

The longer story
----------------------
My name is Thomas Beck, I'm the head of a small studio called
Plasmasolutions (therefore the nick) here in Germany. Many of you know me
at least from the #bcon13, from IRC and as a #b3d dev.

I'm teaching, using and hacking in Blender a lot and am pretty frequent in
touch with the user base. While talking with users I often heard that they
don't know many of the new features of our releases and that they feel like
they were taken by surprise when we changed something suddenly and
important for them (but for us maybe not) - they are mostly not reading the
ML or discussing with us on developer.blender.org.

So I created a series of videos that show our current development progress
every week, give some insight into the development and create some interest
in new features - and I have to say: The comments are overwhelming positive
- users feel more as if they were "part of the development" (I know that
they actually are, but they don't felt like that) now and that they could
get a feeling for new features now early.
Apart from that I'd like to give a bit of shine to the hardworking devs
that are often forgotten outside the dev universe - so I credit as much as
I can ;)

Reading through the comments on yt and blenderartists, many are asking to
make that the standard way of a release log and that we (devs) should put
those sneak peek videos on the www.blender.org page and on the release
notes (maybe as a new features section in companion with cool Blend files
that represent the features).

I absolutely don't think that this should become the standard way of
release logging - I for myself really enjoy reading (and writing) release
logs and have a non-videoish way to look up key combinations and ideas that
led to the development of a specific feature! But people are lazy and I
think we could help them by adding those vids to the logs and maybe the
website ;)

Ton finds the videos cool and supposed I ask you guys here...so what's your
opinion about this? Btw.: Bastien is already using a few to light up his
dev work.

Many greetings ... and go Blender go!
Thomas

------
Plasmasolutions
Design | Development | Training

Website: Http://www.plasmasolutions.de <http://www.plasmasolutions.de/>
Blog: Http://blog.plasmasolutions.de <http://blog.plasmasolutions.de/>

Telefon: 0176 2017 9565