Re: Demo/Tutorial App

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sun, Jun 11, 2000 at 05:05:00PM -0500 or thereabouts, Dan Mueth wrote:
> 
> One of the things I was hoping we could put into the GNOME 2.0 help system
> was an application which would show demo and tutorial slideshows.  It
> would be a generic application which reads an XML file and displays
> screenshots along with text explaining them.  It would be usable by any
> application.  It would allow us to write slideshows which either show off
> an applications features for new users, or which teach users how to do
> basic (or advanced?) things with the given application.

Um. Wow.

> I quickly threw together a demo of Gnumeric, although I don't really
> know how to use it well - somebody else could write a much better
> one.  Anyway, grab this tarball:
> ftp://clack.uchicago.edu/pub/gnome/gnumeric_demo_test1.tgz
> unpack it, and run ./gnome-tutor.py gnumeric_demo_test1.xml
> Then come back and discuss your ideas on this list.  

I think there's huge potential here, definitely. But as with everything
else, it would have to be done right... I'm also concerned that we seem
to be coming up with dozens of ideas at the moment, but a lot of them
really require we grab hackers and say "Can this be done? Can it be
done in time for..? Will you do it?" As I understand it, everyone's
going to be busy porting apps over to new libraries soon, and in the
meantime, we still have little concrete stuff we can start using for
docs for GNOME 2, unless I am missing something. 

However, I love this idea.

> 1) Layout - Do we want to use the GNOME Druid?  Do we want to use the

The gnome druid has the advantage of being consistent with other GNOME
things. It has the disadvantage of being fairly inflexible, though, I
believe. You have to mess about even to stop it having a 'title page'.

> etc.  Aside from looking nice, we need to be careful about screen
> real-estate.  This Gnumeric demo is big.  The screenshots are actually
> smaller than what some apps or an overall GNOME demo would have.  How can
> we make things look nice and fit on a person's monitor?

My god. I run GNOME on a Cyrix MediaGX/233 (this is approximately the
same speed as the early Pentiums) with 32 Mb of RAM. It is entirely
usable with light themes and a fast window manager, but I don't put
Netscape on that machine because it takes about 40s to start up, to
give you an idea. Also -- the -maximum- resolution it will handle is
1280x768. I consistently enter bugs for anything that won't fit into
this, and often for things that can't be shrunk to 800x600. Every says,
"get a better monitor or a better chip". I could do this, but laptop
users can't, and laptop screens are definitely an issue because I 
know loads of people who run GNOME on laptops. There's even one I
was looking at, a Sony Vaio, with a screen of 1280x480 (very small
laptop, screen is thus constrained by its size). In all honesty,
huge parts of GNOME would be unusable with this little thing (which
is gorgeous, -- *covet*, *covet* :)). 

The obvious answer is that any screenshots are shrunk to a maximum
size which we can squabble about until the cows come home :) But I
have discovered there's an art to doing this, especially when text
has to be shown clearly. It comes out "all funny" if you shrink too
far. 
 
> 2) Scripting - Jonathan suggested we could script, such as showing a mouse
> moving across the screen or text being typed.  Basically we would say show
> a cursor moving from [x0,y0] to [x1,y1] at speed S. I think this would be
> *really* cool. Opinions?

How much overhead would this take? Could you have a "run with animations"
and a "run without animations" distinction?

> 3) Movies - We could have short movies, such as just 3 or 4 frames which
> slowly play.  This might be especially interesting in combination with the
> scripting above, where you would show a mouse opening the Main Menu and
> selecting an item for example.  Since it is just a few frames and the
> motion is handled in the scripting, it would look similar to a live movie,
> but would not take up a lot of drive space - and would be easier for us
> doc writers to produce.

Like the way the mail applets have two or three pictures used for 
new mail arriving?

I love the idea, I must say. Again, I feel well out of my depth with
whether other people would love the idea and particularly the human-
computer interaction and UI stuff: do people learn well from this?
What should be avoided and what should be used a lot? All that sort
of stuff.

Telsa