Documenting muCommander?

[hritcu]

Did you ever considered having some documentation for muCommander? I know that probably you don't want to put a lot of time into this, but something as simple as a community maintained wiki would definitely be a step forward. Now a lot of useful information is "buried" inside this forum, which is not exactly useful for non-technical users. For them something as simple as a FAQ would help a lot.

[Stan]

There should be at least a 'help' file. As the app gets more complex it will become unusable if not properly documented.

[hritcu]

There should be at least a 'help' file. As the app gets more complex it will become unusable if not properly documented.

You can always contribute one Stan

[maxence]

Agreed, documentation is definitely needed. I realize some features are not self-explanatory or not properly advertised -- proof is that some features already present in muCommander are often requested in the forums.

A reasonable first step would be to have a Wiki and populate it with the existing documentation scattered across the forums, and go from there. As a matter of fact, setting up a Wiki has been on my todo for a while now. If some of you guys are willing to contribute some documentation, I'll definitely prioritize this task.

Regarding the in-application documentation, I was considering having contextual help buttons that would link back to the Wiki. Here's a mockup to illustrate :

help_mockup.png (25.27 KiB) Viewed 4074 times

This would allow the documentation to be centralized on the wiki and minimize the application-specific work. On the downside, that means help would require an internet access, but that's a fair tradeoff I guess.

In addition to that, some 'Tips of the day' could be displayed on startup to advertise some of the less visible features and teach the user a trick or two.

Do you have any opinion about this ?
Maxence

[hritcu]

Hi Maxence. I agree with all three solutions you mention (they are of course not exclusive):

• Having a Wiki would be great, and I would contribute documentation if there was an easy way to do so
• Having the in-application documentation also based on the Wiki would again be great, since there would be an easy way to contribute
• Additionally having "Tips of the day" would also be nice to have. Not that urgent as the other two though.

[PReDiToR]

Having the wiki pages linked from the app would be disastrous in the case of vandalism.

If you dump a wiki on the site the documentation will take care of itself, very quickly.

[mucomandos]

So, any progress so far?

[Nicolas]

Hey guys,

Sorry for the huge delay in our replies. To be honest, the lead developers on this project have been terribly busy for the past year or so - starting a business, getting married, this type of things...
We got a wake up call this morning and are trying to get our act together, so in theory, a Wiki should pop up really quickly. I'll keep you posted on that.

Again, sorry for our lack of responsiveness, we're trying to address that

Nicolas