Revolution 2.7 documentation panic

[Mark Wieder]

Kevin-

Thursday, February 16, 2006, 4:49:44 AM, you wrote:

> The "topics" and "quick reference guides" have been moved to the main User's
> Guide PDF.  That document is well organized into sections, and there is a
> lot of new material.  More to follow - see the preface.

<rant>

While I appreciate the path to the future laid out there, I'm
concerned about the Now. There are some of us who can't view the pdf
from within the IDE because of the stupid hard-coded path to Adobe
Reader. On my Windows machines I either have to step outside the IDE
to launch the pdf using my full Acrobat or switch over to an OSX
machine. On the whole, it's much easier to pull down the hard copy of
the 2.x docs from the shelf, so I find the current documentation
situation unusable.

It was much handier to have the set of database functions, for
example, collected in one place in the IDE than to have to go through
all this. I find both the "Topics" and "Quick Reference Guides" quite
handy in the old IDE - concise and well-organized, and I don't have to
open a huge pdf with *everything* in it just to find a quick answer to
a simple question.

When things get integrated properly into the IDE I'll settle down
about this topic. I *like* the pdf - I think it would be a great
addition to the online docs, and one that people have been asking for
for quite some time. Replacing working online docs wholesale, even
with the level of general complaining about them, was IMO a bad idea.

That in conjunction with things like preferences not being saved
properly leads me to feel that 2.7 was rushed out the door, possibly
to meet unreasonable marketing deadlines. If I didn't have my hard
copy docs and the 2.6.1 online docs to go to for reference; i.e., if I
were someone newly coming into the rev environment, I'd be pretty
disappointed with this release. I, too, am reverting to 2.6.1 where I
can get some work done until a properly functioning release sees the
light of day.

</rant>

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net