Suggestion: Make "WhatsThis" 100% complete for next release

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Am Donnerstag, 12. Februar 2004 22:54 schrieb Kurt Pfeifle:
> Daniel Naber wrote:

> You need 2 clicks and get a very useful hint about what this
> checkbox' meaning is. If KDE is "whatsthis-complete" we can
> start promoting it as a feature. Currently we can't.
>
> > Of course not
> > every button needs a help, this makes it more complicated. Wouldn't a
> > "hyperlink approach" be more reasonable? By this i mean: next to each
> > button, input field etc that has a help text there's a small blue "?"
> > that can be clicked. Advantages: it's easy to recognize that there *is*
> > help, and it requires only one click.
>
> One or 2 clicks aren't really important.

Never have come to a dialog totally unclear to you? Never experienced how 
tiresome it is to request the meaning of all entries? The less clicks the 
better I want to tell you. 

My feature wish would be that you reach for the Whatsthis-cursor, click the 
window handle and - have all the Whatsthis popped up, placed around the 
window (as much out of the way/view as possible, should be moveable) and tied 
with a thin line to the highlighted field (e.g. by a border) they belong to. 
You would be able to use the dialog still, perhaps can close certain popups. 
Another Whatsthis-cursor click on the window handle would close them all 
again.

>  Whatsthis will only
> be used at the beginning of a user's acquaintance with a new
> app. Or if he uses it very rarely. It is much quicker than
> going to khelpcenter and reading any manual. Manuals are
> read by 2% of users, at most.

Yes. A dialog should be as much self explaining as it could. 

> A '?' near every button and checkbox and radiobutton will
> "clutter" the UI, I'm afraid.

Oh yes. Here and there you already find the xp os(?) method to have the 
hint/help explicitly written in the ui next to the item ("Click here to 
achieve X.", especially annoying as one cannot remove this easily). 

Dreaming: You could rightclick these inserted hints and say "Disappear". After 
that they are still available as Whatsthis text. Perhaps this could be 
generalized, also the other way around? How would this work in regard to the 
overall layout?

> > Also, it would be cool if the documentation could somehow "include" these
> > help texts. Duplication could thus be avoided.

Yes, would be cool if these texts could be reused. Perhaps by having specially 
tagged entries in the docs that are extracted and included in the .ui files 
or the other way around. 

Friedrich