Re: Where we'll put docs for control-center

[Kevin Breit <battery841 mediaone net>]

On 10 Aug 2001 23:53:08 +0200, Rebecca J. Walter wrote:
> perhaps it means we need to use something different for a help browser.
> in  my opinion, nautilus is way too heavy to even CONSIDER for this.

Rebecca,
	Hallaluia (sp?)!!!  Seriously though.  I don't understand entirely why
Greg feels that Nautilus IS the current solution for our help problems.

- Nautilus, in itself, is a heavy program (don't deny it).  Back at
Ximian, I could tolerate reading documentation in it.  But here on this
300Mhz/64MB box...well, I want help, not my disk to swap.  As the end
user, I don't want to wait 30 seconds for my help stuff to show.  The
average computer user has the attention span of 15 seconds before you
lose them (look at me for an example ;).  While a lot of us aren't on
such old hardware as myself, I think a good portion of us...are.

- This is probably a solvable problem.  But, it's how we treat the
sidebar.  If you go more than 2 or 3 levels into the tree in the Help
tab, you need to stretch out the sidebar.  This is a nusance for the
user.  Then when you make it wider, it's too big to be a sidebar, and at
this point, arguably, deserves its own window or frame, not a sidebar.

So...I've said some pretty anti-Nautilus words.  I could be a jerk and
go on, or I could propose some half-assed idea that PROBALBY won't ever
be implimented.  I'll go for the later ;)

- I'd really like to see ghb2 be released.  I'm sure Greg is dying here.
Seriously though.  From what I can tell, ghb ISN'T a big piece of code.
It seems to be basically a window with HTML rendering widgets.  I like
this idea.  Why don't we make a BASIC help browser.  Or how about lets
take a que from Apple Computers?  It's its own application.  It'll open
up in its own window.  It'll have its own searching, categorization, doc
viewer, etc.  Wana embed it in your application?  Good, it's all
bonoboized.

Why do this?  We can do a help system...the right way.  We can probably
design the UI ourselves (with input of course).  We can make it run on
older and newer hardware alike.  We won't be bound to Nautilus or
whatever other things are there.  The user not want help at all?  Great,
don't install it AT ALL!

That's my opinion and what I'd dig :)

Kevin Breit