[IPython-dev] Results of last year's user survey

William Stein wstein at gmail.com
Tue Mar 11 10:43:42 EDT 2014


On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 7:20 AM, Carl Smith <carl.input at gmail.com> wrote:
> Two Pennies...
>
> On surveys, and communication in general, could you not just add a feature
> to the Notebook that allows it to connect to a central server onload, so it
> can let users know there's some news and lets them load the content
> directly? Users should have an obvious, one click toggle to disable the
> connections, but few would.

If you do this sort of "phoning home", it would be good to come up
with a plan about how you're going to use the resulting data.   You'll
have the potential to suddenly know a lot:

   -  how many people are starting IPython, which could be useful data
to have (e.g., for grants, etc.).

   - where they are using it (based on the ip)

   - what version they are using, so you can tell them to upgrade in
the response message.

Etc.

  -- william

>
> If you don't use cookies, or really anything that involves auth or privacy,
> you could do a lot with that easily. Serving Markdown and even pickled [and
> encrypted] Python objects is all easy if you write the client and the
> server.
>
> On one-- and preferably only one --obvious way, if the buttons are in the
> app, they're all obvious and are all part of the way it's done. The obvious
> way should also always be in the Standard Library.
>
> _______________________________________________
> IPython-dev mailing list
> IPython-dev at scipy.org
> http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/ipython-dev
>



-- 
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org



More information about the IPython-dev mailing list