Of the ones you listed, the only one that I'd agree with is Pagemaker.
One can do stuff in pagemaker without reading anything. Photoshop
though, I've found myself hunting for a long time to find things.
Apple's iLife stuff, and Pages are great examples of programs that
require scant reading to get them to work.
I just really believe that of the programs I've used, Finale does have
an excellent index and manual. If I can't figure it out, I can refer to
the manual and find it. Sometimes you have to rethink what you are
asking for, or what it is called, but I have yet NOT to find what I was
looking for in the Finale index/manuals.
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
I cited you four (Photoshop, Pagemaker, Sonar, Adobe Audition), and there
are more (Sony Screenblast, Paint Shop Pro, ULead Studio, SynthEdit, Skype,
Firefox, Systran, Babylon, AudioMulch, Analog Box, Powerpoint...).
Tutorials are needed. Cheat-sheets are needed (especially where odd choices
were made, such as Finale's small numbers).
Nothing can help you if you don't understand the field, whether it's
graphics or photography or notation or audio recording or typsetting or
printing or translation or video. And nothing can save poorly interfaced
software (Cecilia, Finale, MSWord [once you get past basic text entry and
printing], even BitTorrent...)
But if a manual is needed for more than occasional reference for an
exception or an item not covered in tutorials, then fix the program. One
feature should flow naturally from another, and its user interface should
make its behavior clear. Using fix-the-program psychology and user
benchmarking, eventually you'll slim the manual down -- not make it larger.
No one benefits from a manual being required for software (except a guy
like me, who writes documentation; I have had plenty of fights with
programmers whose work is badly done).
Dennis
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