Proposal: Coachmarks on GTK

[Joao Victor <jvital gmail com>]

Hello all,

This email is to send you guys a proposal, and see what you think about it.

# What is it?

The idea of coachmarks is to provide guided tutorials to the user.
Right now, if the user doesn't know how to perform an operation,
what's his first choice? He can fire up yelp, or something else, and
search for his problem. When he finds it, he'll have a bunch of text
to read, with very little interactive guidance.

This is where Coachmarks come in. See a screenshot of coachmarks here:
http://www.quinn.echidna.id.au/Quinn/WWW/HISubtleties/AppleGuideCoachMarks.html

Coachmarks literally show the user how to use the stuff he wants; it
marks widgets with circles and arrows, etc, giving the user a very
nice interactive guide.

# Implementing it

There's 3 parts that must be implemented to make it work:

1. You must be able to draw on the screen. You already have this
implemented, for example, in Gromit:
http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/gromit/

2. You must be able to mark widgets, in a high level way. This is
where GTK comes in... it would provide API's such as
"gtk_mark_widget", "gtk_pointout_widget", etc.

3. You must be able to read some help/guide files and interpret/show
it to the user. This is the last part, and this is too beyond GTK, so
i'll won't talk about it now (this email is long enough...)

So this is it... what do you think about it?

Thanks,
J.V.