Re: About GNOME / return / duck related question

[Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>]

--- Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com> wrote:

> Do you think possibly those two things are related?
> ;-) Depth-first 
> traversals of the user interface are not an exciting
> thing to write, or 
> to read. 
> And writing the eleventy-twoth version of
> "When you start 
> &app;, the following window is displayed" can't be
> fun, either. 
> Meanwhile, for example, Totem has no "What to do if
> a movie won't play" 
> help page, Rhythmbox has no obvious "Sharing your
> music" help page, and 
> Seahorse has no "What are keys used for?" help page
> -- all of which 
> would be more interesting to write *and* more useful
> to read.

Long slogs through the interface are dull to write and
read -- yet they are also the easy option.
Identifying those topics you suggest takes time, it's
harder to know when you've covered the matter at hand
comprehensively, and it's also a lot harder to provide
useful information.
Eg, I don't have a clue what to do if Totem won't play
a movie (in my personal experience, it gives me a
cryptic message I don't understand, so my solution is
'make a note of the URL and go boot your mac')

> > You seem to have some good suggestions for
> bettering our process, 
> > perhaps you would be interested in contributing to
> Mallard ?
> > ...
> 
> I don't know much about process, but I've researched
> help usability a 
> fair bit, helped Don Scorgie design improvements to
> Yelp's search, and 
> I know about designing markup languages. So maybe I
> can help with the 
> specification for Mallard's file format.

I would very much appreciate your input on exactly the
sort of thing you've suggested above. More generally,
structure, style, and tone of documentation.

For example, Shaun's asked me to think about how a
manual might be structured with Mallard. I've started
with gedit here, and I've very much appreciate input:

http://live.gnome.org/ProjectMallard/StructureTestCase

I've also thrown together a few random thoughts here:
http://live.gnome.org/ProjectMallard/DocumentationStyle

> Good on-screen help has "Show Me" buttons.

I was just thinking about that.
Does Yelp currently support anything like that -- a
button that says "Open Thingy Preferences" for example?


	
	
		
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