Re: What's New Pages

[Milo Casagrande <miloc gnome org>]

2010/3/4 Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>:
> Hi folks,
>
> This is another half-baked idea in my brain.
>
> "What's New" pages are really nice to have in application help.
> Users who love the program love to look at a succinct list of
> cool new things they can do.  So let's do them, yeah?
>
> But how about we don't do them, and instead ask developers to
> do them.  We'll put a page with a standard name (whatsnew.page)
> in the help.  When the developers merge in cool new features,
> they can just add a bullet point to this file.
>
> <item><p>You can now frobnicate files!</p></item>
>
> They'll forget sometimes, of course.   So at feature freeze we
> send them a reminder to look at whatsnew.page and make sure it
> has everything.
>
> Developers don't need to write the final content.  They'd just
> provide basic bullet points.  We'll go through their bullet
> points, decide if we have to write new help because of them
> (we probably do), and then make the "What's New" page shiny.
>
> Does this sound like something we'd like to explore?

I like really like the idea to have a "news" kind of page for each application.

I've been thinking about this for a couple of days. Maybe it's just me
being too cautious, but anyway, these are issues I thought we might
face:
- lack of doc people to take action in checking and shaping out that
page (well... if we have *all* Gnome apps help written in Mallard)
- possibility to forget to updated the page from release to release
- possibility to have really too detalied/hacky/developer-oriented
information on that page, in the end it will be
- possibility to have a non-translated topic if information is
collected and fixed late in the development

Ciao.

-- 
Milo Casagrande <miloc gnome org>