Re: What's New Pages

[Russell Dickenson <russelldickenson gmail com>]

On 9 March 2010 01:24, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-03-07 at 18:48 +0100, Milo Casagrande wrote:
>> 2010/3/4 Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>:
>> > Hi folks,
>> >
>> > This is another half-baked idea in my brain.
>> >
>> > "What's New" pages are really nice to have in application help.
>> > Users who love the program love to look at a succinct list of
>> > cool new things they can do.  So let's do them, yeah?
>> >
>> > But how about we don't do them, and instead ask developers to
>> > do them.  We'll put a page with a standard name (whatsnew.page)
>> > in the help.  When the developers merge in cool new features,
>> > they can just add a bullet point to this file.

[snip]

My thoughts on this (as an as-yet GNOME non-contributor :P) were that
perhaps as developers are commit-ing changes, they flag new
functionality with a keyword or special set of characters - e.g.
!!NEW!!. When release time is nearing, grep-ing the commit messages
would reveal new features. Of course it would still take some effort
to convert these dot points into a "What's New" page, but it's at
least a starting point.

I like the idea of "What's New" because it's an easy way for users to
keep up with new features. I remember listening to a podcast episode
many months ago when a co-host said "It's a pity Nautilus doesn't have
a tabbed interface, like that of Thunar." He was immediately told that
in fact it did and where in the menu to look for the feature. If he
had wanted to know that release's new features, he could have read the
"What's New" page and immediately seen the announcement of the tabbed
interface. Experienced users rarely RTFM and you may know, but may at
least read a "What's New" page. In fact, perhaps such a page could be
displayed by Yelp when the app is started for the first time?


Regards,

Russell Dickenson