Praise: Rev Documentation to the rescue

[Judy Perry]

I agree with you entirely on this, Chipp.

And Rev's pretty much in the same boat as HC as opposed to, say,
Flash/Director, VB, etc. in this regard.

The average new investigator sees the product, considers buying it or
adopting it, but unlike Flash, Director, VB, ..., etc., it's not like they
are confident of the ability to hit Barnes and Noble on the way home and
pick up a little helper book or two.  They can't surf on over to
Amazon.com either.

So, what are they to do? I suspect it's not likely that they're inclined
to go looking all over etherspace to find the various (good) and scattered
information, books, e-books, tutorials, video, conference stacks, etc.
etc.  RevOnline is only usable for those already in the inner sanctum (and
those NOT on dial-up I suspect).  People ashamed of its HC descent can't
likely even bring themselves to suggest reading those old books by the
three Dan's.

Perhaps the co. should have a page that itself references where to find
all these various helper thingies... but then there'd be the problem of
appearing to endorse things that might not look sufficiently
'professional' to one audience while harbouring fears of endorsing only
those others that might look indecipherable to another target user
population.

The feeling I continually harbour in the back of my mind is that,
somewhere, there's a distinct unwillingness on the part of the company to
pay for quality tutorial materials, things that are needed by new folks
who are not going to want to pay separately for them and folks that I
can't imagine the company wishes to turn away on that account.

It may seem unfair to expect the co. to invest in this for nothing, but
if, as Norman has remarked, the software isn't minimally useful out of
the box, well, ... it doesn't speak well of the software's ability to be
adopted in the marketplace.

Judy

 On Mon, 25 Jul 2005, Chipp Walters wrote:

> Dan Shafer wrote:
>
> > Designing and writing good docs is nearly as hard as designing and
> > writing good software.
>
> I beg to differ! How many software products/code libraries do you know
> of which don't even have documentation. Poor Xavier and his TAOO project
> is a great example, while he has told us some great ideas-- w/out *good*
> documentation, it's really hard to follow... (no disrespect intended, X,
> I still love you;-).
>
> In fact, without good documentation, much software is rendered unusable.
> A case might even be made that without the books authored by the '3
> Dans,' Hypercard may have never been adopted so widely.