Re: Demo/Tutorial App

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Telsa Gwynne <hobbit@aloss.ukuu.org.uk> writes:
> 
> > I quickly threw together a demo of Gnumeric, although I don't really
> > know how to use it well - somebody else could write a much better
> > one.  Anyway, grab this tarball:
> > ftp://clack.uchicago.edu/pub/gnome/gnumeric_demo_test1.tgz
> > unpack it, and run ./gnome-tutor.py gnumeric_demo_test1.xml
> > Then come back and discuss your ideas on this list.  
> 
> I think there's huge potential here, definitely. But as with everything
> else, it would have to be done right... I'm also concerned that we seem
> to be coming up with dozens of ideas at the moment, but a lot of them
> really require we grab hackers and say "Can this be done? Can it be
> done in time for..? Will you do it?" As I understand it, everyone's
> going to be busy porting apps over to new libraries soon, and in the
> meantime, we still have little concrete stuff we can start using for
> docs for GNOME 2, unless I am missing something. 

It prolly isn't a lot of work to get this working -- I assure you
writing the tutorials will be slower.

> However, I love this idea.
> 
> > 1) Layout - Do we want to use the GNOME Druid?  Do we want to use the
> 
> The gnome druid has the advantage of being consistent with other GNOME
> things. It has the disadvantage of being fairly inflexible, though, I
> believe. You have to mess about even to stop it having a 'title page'.

It's not that hard to avoid a title page, unless you're using glade.
Additionally, it's also not hard to write our own 'pages,' so we can
have our own layout.

<snip>
> The obvious answer is that any screenshots are shrunk to a maximum
> size which we can squabble about until the cows come home :) But I
> have discovered there's an art to doing this, especially when text
> has to be shown clearly. It comes out "all funny" if you shrink too
> far. 

I think part of the use of this will be to highlight sections of the
application, rather then show the whole thing at ever stage.  I think
scrollbars are not a good idea, though, and I'm not convinced scaling
images helps either.

We should try to keep the tutor less then 800x600.

> > 2) Scripting - Jonathan suggested we could script, such as showing a mouse
> > moving across the screen or text being typed.  Basically we would say show
> > a cursor moving from [x0,y0] to [x1,y1] at speed S. I think this would be
> > *really* cool. Opinions?
> 
> How much overhead would this take? Could you have a "run with animations"
> and a "run without animations" distinction?

None, really, at the rates we're talking about.  Don't think Animations,
think "really fast slide shows..."

> > 3) Movies - We could have short movies, such as just 3 or 4 frames which
> > slowly play.  This might be especially interesting in combination with the
> > scripting above, where you would show a mouse opening the Main Menu and
> > selecting an item for example.  Since it is just a few frames and the
> > motion is handled in the scripting, it would look similar to a live movie,
> > but would not take up a lot of drive space - and would be easier for us
> > doc writers to produce.
> 
> Like the way the mail applets have two or three pictures used for 
> new mail arriving?

Yes.

> I love the idea, I must say. Again, I feel well out of my depth with
> whether other people would love the idea and particularly the human-
> computer interaction and UI stuff: do people learn well from this?
> What should be avoided and what should be used a lot? All that sort
> of stuff.

Me too...  Anyone else want to offer some insight?  Perhaps we should
try to write a few and see if they seem helpful.

-Jonathan