Introducing Homerun

[Marco Martin]

On Tuesday 13 November 2012, Nuno Pinheiro wrote:
> A Terça, 13 de Novembro de 2012 11:21:34 Marco Martin escreveu:
> > It would be something that looks way less cluttered than kickoff, but
> > with not many regressions
> 
> +++++++++++ 1 also we need to think about some intrudutory videos to kde
> somtimes we wont ve able make all things in kde instantly discoverable if
> they are a bit outside the way users are used to usualy use an
> app/feature...

yep, agree that a series of videos would be quite useful (a potential problem 
of videos tough is that the quality level they stop to look amateurish is 
pretty high)

We are having the same problem in active: different concepts from what one may 
be used to, so oddly i was having exactly the same conversation with Aaron the 
last week on how solve that, how make a simple way to show users how to do 
something.
An idea that came up is some kind of interactive tutorial  (i just have some 
proof of concept code, nothing really working yet) when a ui is in QML, it may 
be actually not too hard to do.

It must of course be something explicitly lauched by the user (if is on the 
first run/mandatory the first thing one looks for is the skip button :p)

With a 100% qml interface a thing that is possible to do is to put an overlay 
on top of the whole scene, that tells messages, like "click on this text field 
and write foo to search for it", "drag this slider trough its whole length".

There are ways in which this qml scene of the tutorial can have access to the 
objects of the actual ui.

So it may notice when the user actually did the suggested operation, for 
instance by checking the text in that search field, then when the criteria of 
actions to do are met, the tutorial goes to the next step and so on.
Basically like the first level of any videogame.

Now, a videogame is a radically different kind of app (and one approaches to 
it in a different way), so is not 100% sure the concept will translate 
smoothly and there can be some mayor difficulties to work around, especially 
on the desktop.
It may be worth trying with something simple tough ;)

Cheers,
Marco Martin