Re: [Usability] Recommended HIG providing additional info/help

[Age Bosma <agebosma home nl>]

Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 18:38 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
>
>>On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 14:18, Age Bosma wrote:
>>
>>
>>>So far I have seen about 3 different solutions to this problem:
>>>- Add (too much) text near a setting
>>>- Providing a tooltip on input field mouseover
>>>- Using a "location aware" help button
>>

> More to the point, I think Age mostly wants to know why the HIG doesn't
> have any recommendations on user-activated context-sensitive help.  If
> you look at Gnome applications, you don't really see any.  The reason
> Gnome apps don't do it is that none of our UI libraries have an API to
> do it.

But isn't the HIG intended to inform people how things should be done 
instead of how it can be done? ;)

>
> And that's likely the reason the HIG makes little or no mention of it.
> The HIG makes concrete recommendations based on what you can do today
> using GTK+ and friends.  As long as there's no clear API for this, I
> doubt the HIG is going to start pushing it.
>

Maybe extending the HIG beyond the capabilities of the API's wouldn't be 
 such a bad idea. This might cause the dev's to become interested in 
implementing it. It wouldn't hurt to mark such HIG sections "not 
implemented yet" though to prevent any confusion.

>
> So Age, what we need is an eager young hacker to take the reins.  Help
> tools are a blast to work on, and context-sensitive help tools have some
> unique and interesting challenges.  I have some ideas on how such things
> should work, but I just don't have the time to implement this right now.

It's good to hear that there's more interest in this area :-)

>
> If you've been itching to get involved with free software, now's the
> perfect opportunity.
>

I would love to do so though I haven't got the time at all, I'm trying 
to finish of a lot of uni work. On top of that, there are some other 
projects in which I'm semi-involved already, these are very interesting 
for me as well. Also, like I said I'm no Linux user (yet), though I have 
been wanting to use it for a long time now. Imo for me the best way 
would be to help create/contribute to some platform independent programs 
first. This allows me to use the actual program on my current platform 
(Windows) and it might give me an opportunity to roll into the Linux 
platform bit by bit (at the moment I'm have to use a lot of Windows 
based program, which aren't available for Linux, because of uni).

Age