Documentation (OpenInsight 32-bit Specific)
At 09 MAY 2006 12:56:28AM WB Underwood wrote:
I am having difficulty with the sparcity of the documentation. Does a manual exist? Arev was well documented.
Are there other sources of product information?
At 09 MAY 2006 04:37AM [url=http://www.sprezzatura.com]The Sprezzatura Group[/url] wrote:
Funnily I'm currently taking an OI training course and the delegates requested that we print off the online help. I don't see over a thousand pages of help as being sparse - it took forever to print! ;).
In addition both www.srpcs.com and www.sprezzatura.com have helpful articles and white papers.
World leaders in all things RevSoft
At 09 MAY 2006 09:25AM Gerald Lovel wrote:
Well, I'm with WB regarding some aspects of the documentation. My application has context help (AREV's F1), concept help (Arev's CF1), and interactive tour guides. In comparison, the help with OI describes various commands, sometimes somewhat vaguely. The examples in the help are frequently inadequate to understand the application of the commands. But is this all that different from documentation in other systems? Maybe not.
The real issue is probably not documentation, but learning. There are (often external) white papers for some necessary aspects of OI programming, such as promoted events. Most persons do not learn well from this approach, however. You learn what you do, and you do from example. This is why Linux is becoming popular with programmers – plenty of programming application examples with open source are available. I haven't figured out how to get that started with OI, however.
Gerald
At 09 MAY 2006 09:54AM [url=http://www.sprezzatura.com]The Sprezzatura Group[/url] wrote:
There is a very good chapter on Programming Techniques in the Programmers Reference but I guess you can never have enough documentation especially goal-centric.
World leaders in all things RevSoft
At 09 MAY 2006 11:49AM Gerald Lovel wrote:
I have used the 'HowTos' and learned much from them. For example, dynamic menus is a subtlety well explained there. My own AREV application, which is not a large program, had 160+ howto procedure notes, over 200 conceptual help documents, maybe 700 detailed context help entries, and 3 hours of tourguides. One of the most frequent complaints from users was that "there isn't any documentation manual." I don't think there is any way to win in this arena.
BTW, I remember seeing a demo of tourguide-like interactive documentation from you fellows at Sprezz. What is the status of this?
Gerald
At 09 MAY 2006 01:36PM David A Kralman wrote:
So far, my experience has been that if you search far enough, you can indeed find lots of documentation. However, it appears that all of it assumes that one already has a level of knowledge that an individual trying to learn OI may not have. So what may be perfectly adequate, or even overkill, for a person with lots of experience in Windows programming, may be totally inadequate for someone just coming off DOS with no Windows programming experience.
I took the introduction to OI class, and found it makes the same assumptions.
At 12 MAY 2006 10:24AM Colin Rule wrote:
To add my 5 cents worth, I think that the documentation is quite good, and getting better. My grievance however is the number of different places you have to go and look to find stuff.
I think there is about 8 different CHM files to find things in.
It would be much better to have one help center page to go to and then dive off into the appropriate pages from there.
In fact, I think I will go and add a topic to the Suggestion box.
Colin