Hello! I was wondering that how much it would be beneficial to develop interactive flash/video guides instead of long text guides for certain purposes like teaching newbie how to use the tools required by a project and let him feel comfortable with the Fedora Project environment in a short time so, he can start the work(that is actually needed) instead of wasting his first few days asking how to create account, where to create the keys and bla bla bla.
Do you think it can be helpful for home users for whom CVS and GPG Keys etc are alien?
Kindly share your thought. Please reply with +1 - If you think yes -1 - If you think not
further suggestions/comments are more then welcomed.
On Fri, 2007-09-21 at 03:43 +0500, Mustafa Qasim wrote:
Hello! I was wondering that how much it would be beneficial to develop interactive flash/video guides instead of long text guides for certain purposes like teaching newbie how to use the tools required by a project and let him feel comfortable with the Fedora Project environment in a short time so, he can start the work(that is actually needed) instead of wasting his first few days asking how to create account, where to create the keys and bla bla bla.
Do you think it can be helpful for home users for whom CVS and GPG Keys etc are alien?
Kindly share your thought. Please reply with +1 - If you think yes -1 - If you think not
further suggestions/comments are more then welcomed.
I think we've talked about this before -- you will probably want to Google search the archives at Gmane or elsewhere, searching for the term "screencasts." I think everyone was in favor, but there are a couple caveats:
1. Video is much higher bandwidth than text, so the author(s) would need to plan accordingly. 2. No audio would be appropriate, since there's no easy way to translate it.
Other folks may have some additional points to make, but I think there's no one against it per se.
-------------1 Eewwww... Flash has always had a nasty mem leak in it. More so you cannot copy and paste text out of it as examples, can't save off a page to separate file for later reference or merge pages for accumulated knowledge. Edits would require flash tools. Then upkeep would incur so much more overhead and require more from end user.
The only possible benefit I could is for complex tasks that new users might attempt.
On 9/20/07, Mustafa Qasim alajal@gmail.com wrote:
Hello! I was wondering that how much it would be beneficial to develop interactive flash/video guides instead of long text guides for certain purposes like teaching newbie how to use the tools required by a project and let him feel comfortable with the Fedora Project environment in a short time so, he can start the work(that is actually needed) instead of wasting his first few days asking how to create account, where to create the keys and bla bla bla.
Do you think it can be helpful for home users for whom CVS and GPG Keys etc are alien?
Kindly share your thought. Please reply with +1 - If you think yes -1 - If you think not
further suggestions/comments are more then welcomed.
-- Mustafa Qasim Lahore, Pakistan Cell: 0321-6614972 URL: http://www.mustu.info
Registered Linux User# 441709.
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On Fri, 2007-09-21 at 07:54 -0500, Dan Smith wrote:
-------------1 Eewwww... Flash has always had a nasty mem leak in it. More so you cannot copy and paste text out of it as examples, can't save off a page to separate file for later reference or merge pages for accumulated knowledge. Edits would require flash tools. Then upkeep would incur so much more overhead and require more from end user.
AFAICT Gnash does not suffer from the memory leak problem. Copying and pasting text is an issue, though, as is the editing. I imagine most screencasts are conceived and produced as one-off, zero-maintenance projects.
The only possible benefit I could is for complex tasks that new users might attempt.
Since that is, in fact, the target subject matter and audience for the screencasts, I think if someone wants to go to the trouble of contributing it, we should encourage it. I would caution any screencast authors to keep the screencasts modular and short, so that if we need to "fix" (that is, "redo") anything, it doesn't involve a long, drawn-out process of recreation.
Στις 21-09-2007, ημέρα Παρ, και ώρα 03:43 +0500, ο/η Mustafa Qasim έγραψε:
Hello! I was wondering that how much it would be beneficial to develop interactive flash/video guides instead of long text guides for certain purposes like teaching newbie how to use the tools required by a project and let him feel comfortable with the Fedora Project environment in a short time so, he can start the work(that is actually needed) instead of wasting his first few days asking how to create account, where to create the keys and bla bla bla.
Do you think it can be helpful for home users for whom CVS and GPG Keys etc are alien?
+1, definitely. Screencasts are useful, and that's proved by their popularity. It would be great if we had screencasts for some "complex" docs tasks -- I'm about to create one for transifex. It's definitely better than nothing, having in mind what Paul said: they're more or less a one-off thing with zero maintenance.
Also, maybe to show off of a default Fedora desktop, a standard anaconda installation, package management etc. Some people want to see how it will look like, and don't care that much about learning something or being able to copy-paste for it. Some people think that yum is still awfully slow for example, or that there are things that can't be done compared to apt. A screencast-showoff of this would be great IMO.
In other words, screencasts won't substitute proper documentation. And heck, if a screencast is important enough for docs purposes, it could be accompanied by a wiki page with full details, references etc.
In terms of localization, if we have the transcript for every screencast, we could even localize it with subtitles in sub/srt files.
-d
Kindly share your thought. Please reply with +1 - If you think yes -1 - If you think not
further suggestions/comments are more then welcomed.
-- Mustafa Qasim Lahore, Pakistan Cell: 0321-6614972 URL: http://www.mustu.info
Registered Linux User# 441709.
fedora-docs-list mailing list fedora-docs-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-docs-list
On Sat, 2007-09-22 at 08:41 +0100, Dimitris Glezos wrote:
Στις 21-09-2007, ημέρα Παρ, και ώρα 03:43 +0500, ο/η Mustafa Qasim έγραψε: In terms of localization, if we have the transcript for every screencast, we could even localize it with subtitles in sub/srt files.
Brilliant idea!
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Dimitris Glezos -
Draciron Smith -
Mustafa Qasim -
Paul W. Frields