[Bf-committers] Blender doc intergration proposal

Mats Holmberg mats.holmberg at elisanet.fi
Mon Apr 10 11:52:23 CEST 2006


Alexander Ewering wrote:

>
> On Mon, 10 Apr 2006, Mats Holmberg wrote:
>
>> about. Tooltips are usually made useless, take a look at any OS. In 
>> blender there are same kind of symptoms - in the 'render' button 
>> example, having a tooltip like 'start the rendering' is the same as 
>> having no tooltip at all.
>
>
> Heh. I am reminded of the beginning times of Blender open-source, 
> where some
> "newbie-friendlyness" dudes started adding tooltips like "Click to 
> change".
> :-) That's still my absolute favourite. I think they're still all over 
> the
> UI.
>
>> What the user really wants to know is what 'render' means and whether 
>> he/she should press the renderbutton (ie what will happen). For that 
>> info to come across there should be a tooltip explaining the result 
>> of what happens when the program renders - not that it starts 
>> rendering (which is obvious for each and every one). But as an 
>> addition to this the possibility to learn about
>
>
> Sorry, but I think that a tooltip is really the wrong place for a 
> tutorial.
> And to be even more honest, I don't think that it's blender's task at 
> all to
> teach people basic stuff about 3D technology - they're better off 
> buying a
> book at their favourite book store.

To a certain extent I agree. Still, this doesn't dismiss the users need 
for better quick information. I know the renderbutton is a very bad 
example =) Of course it can be expected that a user who takes a look at 
Blender has some knowledge of what 'render' means in CG. It isn't 
feasible to explain everything using tooltips, but tooltips can provide 
real help and act as reminders when needed. I'd like to use toolitips 
myself, just to refresh my memory on what some button did somewhere - 
without breaking the flow and start searching documents. But if button 
foo's tooltip says 'enables foo', that's just irritating. Pointing back 
to the first post I think having an option to find a longer explanation 
directly through the tooltip could be a good idea, not perfect but 
quicker than searching by hand anyway.

I know people tend to see 'proffesional' as something opposite to 'easy' 
or 'user-friendly', but this is something I never got =)

Cheers,
Mats


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