Re: Draining the Swamp: A Technical User's Experience

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Tue, 2002-05-07 at 18:02, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 11:44:49PM +0100, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra was heard to remark:

> > > Maybe  searchable, hyper-linked help that will take you instantly to
> > > that configuration item?  A 'search engine' for things that can be
> > > configured?
> > 
> > I think this is a little too hard... 
> 
> Too hard to implement?   It's easy, I think, tedious, maybe.  You have
> to list everything a user might want to do, index it, make it
> searchable, and link it to the right panel in control-center.  The
> technology to do this is easy; the hard part is writing down everything
> that someone might want to do, and making sure it links to the right
> thing.
> 

We're rather off of foundation-list topics at this point, but the sort
of help system you describe above is implemented fairly effectively in
Windows. Their system uses a series of compact, well-indexed, task
oriented help files with hyperlinks. Click on the link and the
appropriate configuration dialog opens.

There has been discussion of something along these lines as a future
goal for Yelp and the help documentation.

Cheers,
John
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck inkstain net (h) jfleck abqjournal com (w)
http://www.inkstain.net http://www.abqjournal.com

"You don't want to die with the music still in you."
 - John Gardner