Author Topic: suggestion for manual  (Read 6079 times)

Offline lash

  • Newcomer
  • *
  • Posts: 2
    • View Profile
suggestion for manual
« on: January 10, 2007, 08:38:50 PM »
Kirk,

You have mentioned that you want to prepare a manual. My suggestion is that you set up a "wiki" and have your community of users go to work.

I am confident that the members of your user community would be willing to share what they have learned with newbies like me, and I am also confident that there is a lot of knowledge out there distributed among these members. Why not tap this resource? One advantage might be that your users see your program from the outside, and so perhaps they can see it from a different angle that might be valuable to other users.

You could provide a structure of topics, sort of an outline or table of contents for the manual, and let the group have at it. And then, when it looks reasonable, you could freeze portions of the text, edit them, and post a final version.

I suspect that this would save you a lot of time, and perhaps it could produce a good product. And if it doesn't, you could learn something from that.

Offline Kirk Baker

  • Senior Software Engineer
  • Camera Bits Staff
  • Superhero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 24731
    • View Profile
    • Camera Bits, Inc.
Re: suggestion for manual
« Reply #1 on: January 10, 2007, 08:49:24 PM »
You have mentioned that you want to prepare a manual. My suggestion is that you set up a "wiki" and have your community of users go to work.

I am confident that the members of your user community would be willing to share what they have learned with newbies like me, and I am also confident that there is a lot of knowledge out there distributed among these members. Why not tap this resource? One advantage might be that your users see your program from the outside, and so perhaps they can see it from a different angle that might be valuable to other users.

You could provide a structure of topics, sort of an outline or table of contents for the manual, and let the group have at it. And then, when it looks reasonable, you could freeze portions of the text, edit them, and post a final version.

I suspect that this would save you a lot of time, and perhaps it could produce a good product. And if it doesn't, you could learn something from that.

Sounds interesting.

Have you seen the version 4.4 manual yet?  You can download and read about it here.

Are others interested in helping create a user-generated manual?

Thanks for the suggestion,

-Kirk

Offline FairfieldPhoto

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 236
    • View Profile
    • Fairfield Photography, LLC
Re: suggestion for manual
« Reply #2 on: January 13, 2007, 06:09:36 AM »
Why not go the Wiki route and let the manual be "open source" community managed as an online resource?

-Mike

Offline jjlists123

  • Newcomer
  • *
  • Posts: 36
    • View Profile
Re: suggestion for manual
« Reply #3 on: January 22, 2007, 08:55:44 AM »
Have you seen the version 4.4 manual yet?  You can download and read about it here.

Any chance the manual could be included with the program download?
It is an extra step to find the forum post with the manual and download it separately.

Offline lash

  • Newcomer
  • *
  • Posts: 2
    • View Profile
Re: suggestion for manual
« Reply #4 on: January 28, 2007, 05:39:00 PM »
Kirk,

I have downloaded the manual, and a quick glance leads me to believe that it is fairly complete.

Consequently, I believe that my suggestion for drafting a manual via a "wiki" is redundant. But a "supplementary tips" via a wiki might still be a good idea.

At any rate, thanks for the manual.