Jeremy wrote: > > I admire your ability to turn around mockups, they work really well and > communicate very clearly. >
It means a lot for me to hear this from you, Jeremy. Thank you! I've actually also thought about having a "help" mode, I think it could > work well, but obviously not something I want to do during the moratorium. > Moratorium in deed, a very justified decision! And your suggestion for what to focus on meanwhile is causing an incredible thunder in the discussions; while I'm not sure we're seeing *actual* documentation being produced, your suggestion has very much shifted *attention* to be about what we can do to guide newcomers and documentation in general. Fantastic! This "Help mode" idea is more about documentation infrastructure (and not for moratorium time), but it is *two sided*; Obviously it should help newcomers to access help- but it's really also about actually producing documentation, even if indirectly: The "plentitude of help" from the mini-links, interspersed at locations in TW where we see need and linking to whichever documentation best dealing with that issue (and regardless if text, video,..) should *encourage* community individuals to produce *actual* documentation because it would give recognition to their individual efforts. I'd think the majority of community members have never had anything publically recognized and would feel proud if their effort was put up publically. Of course, there's still a "good enough" threshold to pass - but opening up for "any format for any help" allows the, say, video guy to help where he woudn't if it was limited to e.g text. The great need for help we're beginning to recognize and which is obvious from the sheer number of questions on the boards, means we can't afford to be too picky - at this stage (...IMO). The documents etc would refine gradually, and like in e.g Wikipedia, there could be notes saying "this article needs ___" . While Wikipedia leaves a lot to be desired, its undisputed world wide success and it's status as the #1 information reference obviously relies on a community doing what individuals never could. Gradual refinement. Besides, the forms in which people produce documentation (choice of format but also e.g style) also reflects the forms for what is needed. An adult academic expresses him or herself very differently from a gaming teenager - but we want TW to appeal to both. Documentation is merely the means not the goal. (Being helped is the goal ;-) An extension for this "mini help links" is to have it configurable according to need. A beginner gets the default links as illustrated above. An intermediate user goes into ctrl panes, switches to "intermediate help mode", which hides some mini help links and displays some others which point to help at that level. Or, "CSS help mode" to have that help topic accessible. A theme developer adds a "theme help" providing special for that theme. Help is not always needed - but *access* to help is. (And, in my proposal, this *access* is enabled with that single green button.) Almost ironic: So elegant and simple in one sense, but just like paper and pen, yet it takes everyone several years before one can master it possibly even schooling. So simple, so complex. > I'm keen to get some reworking of GettingStarted for 5.1.6 (which is now a > few days overdue) so I've incorporated some of your ideas in an update here: > > > https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5/commit/2698f088517c186705c390362dd516f2709d7141 > > I'd appreciate comments and suggestions. > Will get back on this. > The approach to giving different instructions for different browsers is > clumsy. On tiddlywiki.com/index.html we use the browser-sniff plugin that > lets us conditionally show material based on the current browser. To use > that in GettingStarted we'd need to move that plugin into the core. > I obviously have no idea what the cost in terms of file size, etc would be - but maybe for a getting started edition it's justified? Of, if staying with different instructions, maybe the impression could be softened a bit by using icons for each browser (riding on "familiarity/identification factor"). Click icon opens slider showing the relevant instrux. (Detail; these icons should ideally be listed next to eachothers, not below, because they are not a sequence but instead a, um, road fork.) > I do wonder whether these blow-by-blow instructions are appropriate in > empty.html. The alternative would be to have a "getting started" edition > (perhaps the same as the "introduction" edition) that is specially geared > to taking the user step-by-step through the installation and saving > process. Once the user has achieved that tutorial then maybe they'd be best > served with an empty.html that was relatively brief, mostly being links to > material elsewhere. > IMO, there should be one minimial core version and one "guided edition" designed to prevent every beginner misstep we've identified. BUT a lot of the intro stuff could be easily removable (some kind of batch deletion) when the user feels ready. This could be very much later and at a time he has added a lot of valuable stuff of his own. Should the user reget the deletion, there could be a sepate addon/plugin to just reinstate. So, basically: the bare bones core, a guide addon, and a "guided edition" containing both of these. I haven't embedded the video because there are some privacy issues - as > things stand, Google/YouTube would get pinged each time empty.html was > opened (including when opened locally from a file: URI). We need a new > video macro that displays a local static thumbnail until it is clicked. > Optional video service? Or maybe they all do this. But why is iframing it as you've done now a problem? Instead of current $:/core/images/video maybe it could just be another image showing a thumbnail screenshot of a video, inlcuding that text "Watch video introduction"? I don't quite know what options we have for sliders but maybe having such a tumbnail could open a slider with the video (iframe or other solution), and while slider in ipen state it changes thumbnail image into some type of close slider image or just message. Again, thank you for your thoughts! <:-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to tiddlywiki@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
