Re: Proposal: "What's new"

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 11:23 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 10:12 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> >> Goals? Two really. One - to make it easier for users to discover newly
> >> introduced features.
> > I don't believe that most people care much, partly because they don't
> > upgrade that often. This would be clearer if we had real personas to
> > talk about.
> >
> > People who do care generally find the release notes online already.
> 
> Not really. A lot of people have no idea what GNOME is. They just
> launch the application (or rather click on a document and the app
> "launches itself"), see that it looks slightly different and sometimes
> get curious as to why it looks different.
> 
> Several times in the past I've read through NEWS and ChangeLog files
> just to tell someone what the exact changes were.
> 
> >>  Two - to make it easier to write GNOME release
> >> notes.
> > The UI clutter seems like a high price to pay for the slight possibility
> > that this would help with writing release notes.
> 
> I wouldn't call adding a _third_ option to the menu that usually
> contains "Contents" and "About..." clutter.
> 
> Even if it is clutter, we can still add it as a section in the manual.

I have plans to kill "Contents" in favor of more useful menu
items.  Some are concrete, short-term plans that I think we
can push by 3.0.  Some are more vague.

Short-term, the stock "Contents" should be replaced by the
actual title of the document or page pointed to.  For most
applications, this will be "ApplicationName Help".  This
would then be followed by menu items that point to certain
key pages in the help.

More vague plans include auto-populating a group of menu
items from bookmarks or recently viewed pages, as well as
searching directly from the Help menu.

So a Help menu might look like this:

  Search [_______________]
  ---
  ApplicationName Help
  Useful Page #1
  Useful Page #2
  ---
  Possible auto-generated page links
  ---
  Web links and other stuff
  ---
  About

I actually really wouldn't be opposed to having a "What's
New" page in the help.  I think it could also be helpful
to the documentation team, because it gives us a better
sense of what else we need to update.

Whether that's a key page worthy of a menu item is open
to debate, though.

--
Shaun