Re: Retiring app menus - planning for 3.32.0

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Fri, 2018-09-21 at 12:24 +0100, Allan Day wrote:
> Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> wrote:
> ...
> > > Putting aside the issue of outdated user docs,
> >
> > Well, it's a pretty big factor here.
>
> Can't we just remove out of date user docs?

We certainly can, though that means there's no place to put the
keyboard shortcuts then ;)

> I realise that my line of reasoning is somewhat hypothetical here,
> but
> if there are issues with the user docs, we ought to fix them.
>
> > >  do you experience any
> > > advantages having keyboard shortcuts in the shortcuts window, as
> > > opposed to the help?
> >
> > It's faster to access for users, has terser explanations (no need
> > to
> > create sentences to describe actions) and
>
> To be clear, I'm still thinking this through but, if you had a page
> in
> the user docs which was a simple table of keyboard shortcuts, which
> was one click away in the user docs, there wouldn't be all that much
> to separate it from the keyboard shortcuts windows.

The docs would still show up in a separate application, and you'd be
mixing writing styles. The user docs are usually more verbose, and the
keyboard shortcuts are terse.

Their terseness and searchability make them pretty good to discover
application features, compared to menu item searching for example.

>  And the advantage
> would be more integrated user documentation (I think that's
> essentially what the keyboard shortcut windows are). This would
> reduce
> the number of menu items, allows cross-linking, and so on.

Obviously, cross-linking would be useful, but I wonder how much there
is to gain having "Pressing the Play button will start playback" in the
docs.

I guess whether saving space is useful might depend on the
application's menus, I don't think that's a major problem for Videos,
maybe it's a different problem for apps like Web.

> > it's usually better updated
> > as it lives in the code, as opposed to being separate in the docs.
>
> I can see how that's an advantage, but it also feels like a bit of a
> workaround, if we assume that we need up-to-date user docs one way or
> another...