[Bf-committers] Blender doc intergration proposal

[Stephen Swaney]

On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 09:46:44AM +0200, 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.

Heh, indeed.  The purpose of tooltips is to provide a hint or reminder
when the meaning of the button label or icon is not clear.  The word 'tip'
here means 'advice or hint', not 'point' They are most useful for
cryptic icons and buttons like Cmir.  For buttons like 'Render' they
are redundant and rather silly.

> 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.

Having a little 3d background in User's Guide is not a bad thing.  It
does not belong in a Reference Manual.  And certainly not in the
tooltips.

-- 
Stephen Swaney			
sswaney at centurytel.net