[Sugar-devel] Purpose for Help Activity

[Tony Anderson]

Hi,

The ShowNTell activity provides both slide show and sound capability. 
The slides are images at present. Slide shows based on screenshots are 
easy to create.

I am trying to port it to use webkit so the slides can be html. This is 
a problem at present because use of webkit now requires a port to gtk3.

Tony

On 10/16/2012 10:22 AM, Gary Martin wrote:
> Hi Tony,
>
> On 16 Oct 2012, at 14:34, Tony Anderson <tony_anderson at usa.net> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> What is the purpose of help? In Windows, help is a method to find out how to accomplish a particular task using an application. It is not a means to learn how to use the computer or Windows.
>>
>> The Help activity is a specialized reader for the Floss (pdf) manuals.
>> Unfortunately, the text in the Floss manuals was written for experienced computer users who were new to the XO and the Sugar.
>>
>> I believe we need a Sugar activity to introduce the XO and Sugar to those who have no prior computing experience. Further, we need to use the 'learn to learn' approach we advocate for the XO, i.e. these materials should be designed for experimentation (trial and error) and collaborative learning. The beauty of the computer is that it provides instant feedback on whether you did something 'right' or not.
>
> Yes an initial version of this landed in the last release cycle, it was the Welcome Activity. It's just really a basic slideshow, that has a simple folder structure that is intended to be customised by deployments to add their own material. It's success will be down to what quality of content it contains. Currently it just supports images, not animations or sound, though that was a future 'like to have' on the feature list. The activity also used by a matching first boot behaviour that displays that same content on first boot before the user is asked to type their name or choose a colour. The current default content is almost all visual/cartoony, no text reading expected (though there are some screenshots of the UI as part of the cartoons), one issue is that if it dose need to be locale customised, good image content does not seem to be easy for many to create, and can make the activity larger than otherwise ideal.
>
> Gonzalo: Is it worth uploading the Welcome activity to ASLO (I just looked and couldn't find it), or will this cause some issues for deployments (e.g. a user 'upgrading' at ASLO might wipe local generated content)? Though it would provide all existing users/deployments the chance to see the content (and suggest/provide improvements)
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
>> I also believe that use of screenshots, screencasts and icons can reduce the dependency of these materials on text. Another underutilized tool is audio. If the text instructions were spoken, any deployment would be able to provide the same instructions in the native language (the skill needed would be a speaker of the native language who also knows English). Incidentally, in deployments where English is a medium of instruction, using both versions can help children learn English.
>>
>> Tony
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> Message: 3
>>> Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 09:05:08 -0300
>>> From: Gonzalo Odiard <gonzalo at laptop.org>
>>> To: "S. Daniel Francis" <francis at sugarlabs.org>
>>> Cc: Sugar-dev Devel <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>
>>> Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] Purpose for Help Activity
>>> Message-ID:
>>> 	<CAJ+iPVRgkE8Qenkjc3dQv8dUfybjCzESdtg8qvRxv8HzfQvxng at mail.gmail.com>
>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>>>
>>> Help issues are known and we need solve it,
>>> but I don't agree with the proposed solution.
>>>
>>> The style can be changed with css, that is not a problem.
>>>
>>> The biggest problem we have today, is found people to write the help.
>>> If we impose to a potential writer the work of learn docbook,
>>> will be worst. And writing a docbook editor is not a trivial task.
>>>
>>> About having help content inside the activities,
>>> probably is a good idea. We need think about:
>>> * how enable the translation of that content (and how much disk space
>>> will use if we have all the translations inside the activity)
>>> * where put the content related to sugar (not activities)
>>>
>>> Gonzalo
>>>
>>> On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 10:03 PM, S. Daniel Francis
>>> <francis at sugarlabs.org>wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> Looking at the Help activity, I see the following issues:
>>>> - It looks very orange. A more integrated style is needed.
>>>> - Activities should be documented independently of the help activity.
>>>>
>>>> (Not very related with my purpose but important for deploy a solution)
>>>> - The documentation needs to be updated and Gonzalo told me about
>>>> there were efforts to update it. ?Where are them?
>>>>
>>>> Now I purpose some solutions:
>>>> - Using docbook.
>>>> Docbook is used by the GNOME documentation team and can be styled
>>>> easily with CSS.
>>>> - Save the documentation in each activity.
>>>> With that way, Help could scan each activity for documentation, that
>>>> documentation could depend of the installed version of each activity.
>>>> And documentation for non-core activities could be seen from the Help
>>>> activity.
>>>>
>>>> Knowing that the Help isn't up to date, I only migrated the first
>>>> chapter for give you a preview of my purpose.
>>>>
>>>> A screenshot:
>>>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Help-docbook-purpose.png
>>>>
>>>> On the git repository:
>>>> http://git.sugarlabs.org/~danielf/help/help-docbook
>>>>
>>>> For generate the HTML files I used the following command: (Already
>>>> generated in the repository)
>>>> $ yelp-build html -o ./help/ sources.xml
>>>>
>>>> Warm regards,
>>>> Daniel Francis.
>>>>
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>
> .
>