Re: Yelp

["Eugene O'Connor" <Eugene Oconnor Sun COM>]

Shaun McCance wrote:

[snip]

> > A number of issues mentioned where the docs guys think Yelp could use
> > some work are:
> >
> > - index keyword search: I know Scrollkeeper inside out so I know that it
> > supports index search if index markup is provided in the docs and I also
> > know that Yelp has support for this, but the 2.4.0 version I am using
> > does not display any index present in the docs
> >
> > - search in documents: this is not supported at all, some kind of text
> > indexing facility that indexes all docs and provides search though Yelp
> > would be great
> 
> Searching is the killer feature that we're all waiting for.  There's a
> lot of work that needs to be done to make it work well, and I've only
> just begun working on it.

I think displaying index terms is as important as searching. As a user,
this is always the first place I look. If I cannot find what I want in
the index, I use the search. Does Calum have any insight to how users
use these features?

[snip]

> 
> > - UI: it has been mentioned that the UI could use a facelift, it is not
> > very obvious for me what this means, but we could work on identifying
> > issues if it comes to it
> 
> I want to move away from a browser interface.  Currently, we have Back,
> Forward, Previous, and Next.  This sort of thing happens all the time in
> browsers like this, and it really confuses people.  I'd like to rethink
> the Back/Forward thing and focus more on Yelp as a structured viewer for
> structured documents, rather than a document browser.

Can you provide more information on the difference between "structured
viewer" and "document browser". I'm not 100% sure what you mean. Are you
saying that users get confused by the difference between "Back/Forward"
and "Previous/Next"?

The Sun GNOME doc team suggested that Yelp needed some look-and-feel
improvements in our GUADEC 2003 presentation (see
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gdp/articles/guadec-2003/GUADEC4_whitepaper.html).
In particular we suggested that the stylesheet could be improved (see
screenshots in the Future, Technical Aspects section).

We also suggested that the general appearance of the Yelp front-end
could be more visually appealing. 

> 
> > - tips: this could be part of Yelp or completely independent, it would
> > be useful to have the Tips window that a lot of other desktops have
> 
> If you mean context-sensitive help, like at the widget level, then this
> is going to require some support in the toolkit.  I have some ideas on
> this, but it's not really on the front burners right now.

Actually what we meant here was a "Tip of the Day" dialog that displays
when you log in (with an option to turn it off, of course). So we could
have 30 or so tips, such as "To add a panel, right-click on a vacant
space on any panel, then choose New Panel from the popup menu.", and so
on. And perhaps we could have all of the Tips in a document in Yelp.

Of course context-sensitive Help would be great too.

[snip]

> >
> > I know that the Shared Documentation System thread on freedesktop.org is
> > about making everybody's life simpler by getting rid of middlewares like
> > Scrollkeeper. Scrollkeeper provides some functionality that people will
> > need as build tools if Scrollkeeper is not present (like index and TOC
> > extraction from docs). It would be good to know how and when you plan to
> > move away from Scrollkeeper.
> 
> I don't know when.  I've been trying to write up a draft proposal, but I
> keep getting sidetracked trying to fix Yelp bugs.  Hopefully I'll get a
> chance to work on it and post it later this week.  Then it's a matter of
> having discussions and hammering things out.  There's really no telling
> how long that will take.  I'd love to have it in place for 2.8.

Will removing ScrollKeeper make it easier to improve the look-and-feel
of Yelp - the parts of Yelp that I find least attractive are the Home
page and the categories or documents page directly below the Home page.
Basically any page that doesn't display a document.

[snip]