GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 393317
Enhancement: Help users understand how to use Tomboy in Start Here note
Last modified: 2008-02-26 20:52:54 UTC
There was some discussion earlier in #tomboy about how to help new users of Tomboy understand how to use links. I've heard from quite a few people that it took them a while to understand what links are and what their benefit is. An idea was to include instructions in the Start Here note on how to create links and possibly create linked notes already for the user so they can see them in action. Eventually, it would also be nice to show a short Tomboy demo video (a link to the video in the Start Here). Or, perhaps have images directly in the Start Here note that explain certain concepts, like the panel applet/tray icon and how to use it.
Created attachment 79490 [details] [review] Proposed fix for inclusion in GNOME 2.18 I'd like to include this for GNOME 2.18 (feature freeze is Monday). If you have any thoughts/ideas before I check this in, please let me know.
I should mention that what this patch does is...describes a little bit what linking in Tomboy does in the "Start Here" note. It creates a new "Using Links in Tomboy" note which is mentioned in the "Start Here" note. I'll attach a screenshot.
Created attachment 79493 [details] Screenshot of Start Here note
I like this idea. There is a typo in the new Start Here note: it should read "Use this \"Start Here\" note to begin organizing [...]". The "to" is missing. Should the Help docs be mentioned?
I like this. One concern I have is that it'll be really difficult for translators to work with all these segments of heavily markup'd text. I know it goes against translator recommendations but I think it makes sense to use a single string with embedded markup for these notes and a single call to Catalog.GetString. Some minor text changes: "Create additional notes for your other ideas too. Organize your notes by linking them together!" -> "You can create new notes to hold your ideas by selecting the "New Note" item from the Tomboy Notes menu in your (Gnome Panel/System Tray Icon area). Then organize the notes you create by linking related notes and ideas together!". It'd be cool if we could tell the context Tomboy is running in and put that in the Start Here note. It might be outdated the next time they run tomboy, but that might be okay. One wacky alternative is to make the tomboy applet/tray-icon blink on the first run, and tell the user to click the blinky thing (and stop the blinking when they do). I think you can remove the "Note: " bit in "Using Links in Tomboy" This is really great, and something I've intended to do for a long time.
Created attachment 79757 [details] [review] Updated patch ready to commit. This is the patch I've committed to SVN. Thanks for the feedback.