Re: Making release notes more useful - 'whats new ?'

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2011-10-13 at 10:29 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> so I have been thinking a bit about our documentation efforts and how
> to make the most out of the awesome work that is done in this area, as
> well as the release notes.
> Floating these ideas to the relevant lists before writing it down as a
> feature proposal seems like a good idea, so you can shoot it down
> early if it doesn't sound good.
> 
> I think we should have a 'Here's whats new' summary that greets the
> user the first time he log in to a major new version. I guess this
> would be like the release notes, but shortened
> to to fit into a single screen. We could offer 'learn more...' links
> to the more extensive release notes from there. To make that work
> regardless of network, having the release notes installed together
> with the rest of the documentation would be good.
> 
> We can also add a 'New to GNOME 3 ?' link that points to the Desktop
> Overview (something that we should have done for 3.0, really).

I've been wanting to add a "What's New" page to all our help for
some time now. When people upgrade, they can just quickly look
at the help to see what cool new stuff they're getting. People
don't necessarily upgrade every six months, so keep the old news
in there and rotate it out after maybe four releases.

That's simple enough for application help, but for the desktop
we'd have to put more thought into it. For example, our release
notes talk about Epiphany's "Save as Application". Do we cover
that in a desktop-wide "What's New", even though it would also
be covered in Epiphany's? Nothing unsolvable. Just takes thought.

As for an intro tutorial, I don't think any of our existing help
pages are a fantastic first-time tutorial for GNOME 3. We have
pages that tell you about the various pieces, and some overview
pages, but nothing that compels you to work through it for five
or ten minutes.

For an intro, you want something that makes you do things, even
if they're not things you were setting out to do right now. For
example, it could have you add Cheese to the dash, then remove
it again.

And for that kind of thing, I think we could have something more
fun and more interactive than a help page.

--
Shaun