ERe: help button in our main menu

[Len Ovens]

On Mon, July 9, 2012 5:45 am, Scott Lavender wrote:

> Can I ask what people would like in the "Help" menu?
>
> Xubuntu has information in their help file, which is most likely just
> general desktop use. Do we wish to use this as a starting point and
> moderate it to fit our applications?
>
> Should we try to include some basics for recording audio, editing video,
> or
> making graphics? If so, do we add to this help file, link to the website,
> or include website text in a local file?
>
> I think we could even expand the "Help" menu to include things like a
> "Release Notes" entry, link to the website, link to the forums, or link to
> access IRC via webchat. I am thinking of this as almost a "Support" entry.
> But these are just ideas.

I have done some thinking on this. I think that for the long term, there
should be enough on the ISO/disk to get someone going with no net. That
is, it is assumed that there will be a network connection at least through
install, but a studio that has things working just right may want to
freeze their install with no updates and no network connect. It would be
nice if there was enough reference on the disk to answer minor questions.

To start, I think it is valid to get at least a "list of links" page where
everything is net linked and add local pages as we have time. I do not
think disk space is a problem these days, but ISO space still is. So where
an application we ship does not come with it's doc package, our doc page
should have a pointer to an application that installs all the ISO app docs
that may be missing or they should be downloaded at install time. In fact,
if our doc pages get too big this would be an option for them as well,
though there should be at least enough shipped to tell someone trying the
ISO out this is the case.

Our website already has a documentation section and so the URL should be
in the ISO docs as for further reference so that people with a netless
machine can easily look it up on their "other" computer ;-)  (my opinion
is that a working audio machine should not be used for accounting,
browsing or word processing anyway and computers are cheaper than a lot of
other audio equipment we buy, so a second computer is not unreasonable to
expect... which is why I do everything on one machine :P )

-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net