Video Tutorials (was: Anyone Intrested in new Project)

[Adriaan de Groot]

Hey Bulldog,

> Yep, great ideas firstly like you say we will pull all our ideas together
> in one place, then we will look into the feasability of these ideas and
> whether they will work.

Can I push once more for using the KDE wiki ( http://wiki.kde.org ) for such 
organizational matters? The wiki itself is a mess, but if you know what 
you're looking for it's easy enough to get things done there. That saves you 
mucking about with secret websites, PHP hacking and a whole lot more. It 
gives you a place to coordinate with folks and let your ideas crystallize to 
a point that they become practical to implement.

For instance, I'm still not clear on whether you want these videos to be 
attached to application windows (ie. when calling on context-sensitive help 
for window X, you might get a video describing what it does) or catalogued 
somewhere (so you can watch the 30-minute video special "Getting started with 
KDE") or something else.

There have been various notions of "improved context-sensitive help" over the 
years, I'll list just two I've worked on (but not carried through):

* show all whatsthis help instead of just one (various layouts possible)
* attach a (scripted, interactive) help window that wizard-like steps you 
through interacting with a dialog

> After this, contact with the doc developers would be needed to ensure that
> they can find it easy to use the system and set the standards that kde
> want, for example only allowing one theme.

Remember that the docs teams have an extensive toolchain already and a lot of 
people using it - they have more intertia than you do, so take care not to 
present a tool that requires major changes. Again, there are people already 
working on similar things - Rainer Endres with video demos of KDE, Sander 
Koning with automated screenshots. Whether those mesh with your video 
tutorials idea is up for debate: for all you've made clear so far, it could 
be a video of you sitting at a computer demonstrating how to operate 
something, providing voice-over commentary interspersed with screenshots. 
That's not hard to realize, though post-production would take a lot of time 
and chosing the subjects is tricky (what needs to be dealt with? is setting 
up disconnected IMAPS worthwhile? etc.).

I don't want to sound too negative (because I think it's a neat idea to have 
video tutorials, _whatever_ that means), but you really need to make clear 
_what_ you want to achieve, and use the cheapest tools available to get that 
clarity. Then come things like websites (ooh, just saw your next message 
about CMSsen: use the wiki! use the wiki! or steal the solid.kde.org setup, 
just don't waste time *now* on messing around with fancy stuff) and a 
coordinated effort to provide lots of content.



-- 
These are your friends - Adem
    GPG: FEA2 A3FE Adriaan de Groot
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