Re: (no subject)

[thristian atdot org]

On Fri, Nov 17, 2000 at 01:33:19PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le ven, 17 nov 2000 12:43:58, Ilan Volow a écrit :
> > it. In other words, we could give each type of onscreen
> > object (with a few
> > exceptions, like menus) its own "help" entry in the
> > contextual menu, 
> 
> Isn't it what the ?-> icon does in some win softs (click on
> it, then on th objet you want contextual help on).

Yes, but that's generally crap in Win9x. For one, it just doesn't
appear in a lot of dialogs, and for two, it generally gives no
information at all. I don't have an example in front of me, but the
sort of thing I remember is being confronted with a Networking config
dialog and a textbox labelled "Gateway IP:". So I think "What's a
Gateway, and how do I find out what I need to put in this box?". I
click on "[?]", click on the box, and it tells me "Enter the IP
address of your gateway in this box". Well, duh.

> And I do think it's better than adding an entry in all
> context menus (not to mention it doesn't work for a lot of
> items like toolbar buttons). Less clutter

The idea of "List every possible action I can do to the current
selection" is not quite a right-click menu - context menus generally
only supply commonly used actions, not all possible actions. 

However, a lot of tasks aren't going to be framed in the way the
computer wants. Example: My mother does a bit of graphic design for
the local church. She gets a piece of body text in Word, and wants to
put it into CorelDRAW, and doesn't know how. Corel won't open Word
files, and Word won't save to Corel format - Word edits text, and
Corel edits pictures. 

So she comes to ask me, and I tell her she can just copy and paste.
There is no way she would ever have tried that, or even looked for it
among the possible actions, because that seems like trying to turn
emotions into turnips - the two ideas (pictures and text) just aren't
compatible. She may have looked for "export" or "save as"
possibilities, in "possible actions", in the help, but not found
anything useful at all.

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