Re: (no subject)

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Fri, Nov 17, 2000 at 02:39:36PM +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> Of course, here at Sun our keyboards have a huge button with the word
> "Help" written on it, which is much more sensible  :o)

Yes...

Does CDE have spot help? the open look desktop had a feature where pressing
f1 gave help about whatever was under the mouse opinter, so you could
get help on individual menu items.  The help had a window with a picture
of the actual context and a (rather boring unformatted) text window.

I think if you have the xview client application sinstalled (e.g. textedit)
you can probably try this, using F1 if you don't have a Help key.

As for how to tell people about it, tip of the day, tutorials, maybe
"press F1 for more information about any item" in the status bar...

One UI library I wrote a long time ago (1988/89 I think) had a
menu item "Info", that would give you information about where you
were and what you could do, and another, Explain, that told you how
were expected to achieve the current task, how the controls worked.
It wasn't a very clear distinction at the time, but it is a bit like
the diference between Help and "What's this?".

I *don't* see the way forward as, "if uncertain, copy Microsoft".
that will always lead to a second-class citizen.  Instead, if
uncertain, think about what the user needs.  Consult Use Cases.
If the resulting interface is similar to a Microsoft one but
slightly different, it is worth thinking about compatibility at
that point.

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
author, The Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley, August 2000
Co-author, The XML Specification Guide, Wiley, 1999