Re: Epiphany release notes

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi, Reinout!

On Tue, 5 Sep 2006 09:01:26 +0200
"Reinout van Schouwen" <reinouts gnome org> wrote:

> Or "Epiphany now uses the latest technology from Mozilla.org to let
> you check the spelling of text entered in the web browser. The spell
> checker needs a Firefox 2.0 (or equivalent) back-end to work."
>
> Sounds better? I don't think we should be getting any deeper into
> technical details...

It may sound better -- well, more cooperate like, IHO ;-) -- but it
detracts readers by letting them read ten words of uninteresting
information without a good reason. I don't think they care much what
Epiphany uses. They want to know what additional benefits GNOME
2.16 provides for them.

Thus, I'd like to keep the 'You can now ...' approach.


> Well, I can see how it's reasonable to allocate more space to
> components with more visible new features. It's just that web
> publishing space is cheap :) However the release notes should not be
> so long that people give up reading half way. Do you think that would
> be the case?

I believe that the majority of readers will already give up after the
third page. Maybe they will read a forth page if I can find a good
description of performance improvements. Of course, I'm not really sure
about it -- a statistic would help.

But I'm quite sure that nearly 99.99% of all readers will have
forgotten what made this GNOME release different to the ones before
within three days.

If we're lucky they will remember the major headlines: "Eye candy,
feature improvements, usability improvements, etc." but, honestly,
I think this will only work if we keep the headlines for the next
releases. 

As a test: Just try to remember what was the most important post on
planet.gnome.org three days ago. Or as a different one: Can you
remember what you eat for breakfast three days ago? ;-)

See? Your breakfast was something you could see, small, and taste; it
was no abstract description. Still, most people have problems
remembering it immediately.

The details of our release notes will be forgotten within hours.

If we're really lucky readers will somehow have the impression that
they have made the right decision by using GNOME, or that they should
give GNOME another try the next time. That's the best we can hope for.


> > important. Since I have problems to understand the first item in
> > your release notes, I'm only good enought to represent an outsider
> > point of view.
>
> OK, so maybe that part needs rephrasing too. What it means is that, in
> contrast to previous versions, the back-button-history is preserved
> in a new tab or window when you open it from a link on some webpage.
> Say that you've visited sites A, B and C and are now viewing site X.
> Site X contains a link to site Y but you decide you'd rather view
> site Y in a different tab. You could copy the Y address to the
> clipboard, paste it in the address bar and press Ctrl+enter to have
> it open in a new tab (this functionality was polished in 2.16 too, by
> the way). Then the history under the Back button for site Y is empty.
> But you could also right click the link to Y and select 'Open in new
> tab'. Then sites A, B and C will now be available in the back-history
> of site Y as well as site X.

This is tricky. I would suggest:

 "You can now continue to use the history of the originating website if
you open the next website in a new tab: the full history will still be
available under the 'back' button, for both tab windows."

If you need a short description for gnomefiles, write something about
"better history navigation" or so.

Cheers,
Claus