Re: Files guide

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2011-03-28 at 11:42 +0100, Phil Bull wrote:
> Hi Shaun,
> 
> On Sun, 2011-03-27 at 20:47 -0400, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > Attached a screenshot. I'm trying to condense the information
> > somewhat, and remove sections that only hold one or two topics.
> > Plus there's a screenshot, just for pizzazz.
> 
> This looks great! Perhaps we should go for the condensed links +
> screenshot format for all of the top-level guide pages? (Or at least
> where it makes sense.) The guide page screenshots convey little useful
> information, but they do make the help look nicer (and therefore more
> approachable).

Yeah, that was kind of my thought process. It would be nice to do
(or find) some real studies. But my gut feeling is that people see
a screenshot and think "this is nice, let's have a look".

Anyway, I ended up pushing a variant. I changed the topic links in
the sections back to link divs with 2column, and just left the top
topic links as "linklist nodesc", and added "bold". Bold feels right
when the rest of the links are link divs.

Because the top links are nodesc, part of my criteria for putting
links in the top list is that the title should be such an obvious
task that we have a hard time coming up with a desc.

> The "I lost a file!" and "Open files with other applications" topics are
> buried. These are going to be frequently-used, so they should be
> prioritised.

I agree.

> I think that the UI-specific docs on File Manager preferences (e.g. File
> Manager display) should be linked into their own guide page, and only
> that guide page should be linked into the top-level Files guide. Either
> that, or the topics should be given more descriptive names/descriptions
> which demonstrate the relevance of the topic to the user.

I agree. I'm kind of thinking an orphan guide for preferences,
which we can seealso to files.page. I'll play with it.

That section is mixing file properties and preferences too. I
think we can do the properties stuff much more task-y. But we
do need a page for nautilus to go to from the Help button. It's
nautilus-file-properties-basic now, which I know isn't the best.
But I did get the code through, and I don't want to try to push
another code change.

--
Shaun