RE: Quick Help

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Gregory Leblanc wrote:

[snip]

> > GNOME Quick Help
> [snip]
> > The down side of course is that it makes a lot more work for 
> > us, since we
> > have to maintain both a user manual and quick help.
> 
> Assuming that this gets agreed upon as a "good thing" (TM), I think that the
> increased maintenance would be well worth the returns of having more than a
> reference manual.  

It sounds like this is the general concensus.

> [snip]
> > have specific questions on how to do something.  My impression is that
> > most people don't have the patience to sit down and read more 
> > than a few
> > sentences if they basically know how to use an application 
> > and just want a
> > question answered.
> 
> I think that this is a good idea, but I consider it of secondary importance
> to other things.
> Specifically, every application should have a COMPREHENSIVE reference
> manual, that documents every feature of that application.  This makes for
> some huge manuals, but complete at hand documentation is well worth whatever
> space it takes.  I believe that this is mostly complete for the apps that
> ship with the core of GNOME.
> The second critical piece of help is context sensitive help.  GNOME is
> completely lacking in this area.  There needs to be a way that I can click
> on a help button, and then click on something on my GNOME desktop, or my
> GNOME/GTK+ app, and get a brief description, and a link to a more complete
> description in the reference manual.
> It's great to offer task based documentation, but I feel that complete
> reference manuals and context sensitive help are more important, and more
> pressing, than small "how do I get this done" segments.  If others don't
> agree with me, I'll be happy to go along with the quick help, I've got some
> ideas on how to structure that as well.  Later,

We will have context sensitive help starting with GNOME 2.0. I think that
your suggested prioritization is a good one (a complete manual, context
sensitive help, then quick help).

Dan