Towards 3.0

[Dirk Hohndel]

Lutz Vieweg <lvml at 5t9.de> writes:

> On 02/03/2013 09:38 PM, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
>>>    From my experience I'd say a large part of the diving community
>>> is not very IT-affine, so they won't notice the appearance of a free
>>> software like subsurface easily.
>>
>> Correct. And I'm not sure our software (and especially its
>> documentation) is ready for that market. Whenever I have divers I know
>> outside of computer circles try this they fail within minutes and give
>> up on it, going back to far worse software that they think they can
>> figure out. So that is our biggest challenge.
>
> Did you notice anything in particular that those people stumbled upon?

Yes. Inability to edit anything. They try the logical thing of editing
stuff "in place"... that's why we now have a tooltip there...

> Given how difficult it appeared to me to circumvent all the pitfalls
> of SDM when I used it initially, subsurface looks like an ergonomics
> prize winner in comparison, to me...

I thought so, too, But I was wrong.

>> But seriously, then we'd need a German language web page and German
>> translation of the documentation, wouldn't we?
>
> IMHO, the very same people that are not IT-affine in general are also
> completely reluctant to read any kind of documentation text exceeding
> two sentences.

:-)

So we need to make sure tooltips explain enough.

> Thus I'd say putting effort into a full-blown documentation text is
> kind of futile.
>
> Instead, I'd propose to add tome "tool tip"-like mouse-over pop-up help,
> that could be activated by default from the start, and de-activated by a
> help menu entry. Such pop-ups could just contain the one or two
> context-relevant sentences that the lazy mob is willing to read before
> giving up.

Suggestions what to do and where would be great.

>>> If time permits, I'd also volunteer to prepare a simple German language
>>> "landing page" to link to, just to make sure that non-english speaking
>>> users do at least find the "download" button ;-)
>>> Would you be willing to host such a "localized" landing page on hohndel.org?
>>
>> I'd be willing to work with you on a localized version of
>> subsurface.hohndel.org/de
>
> In what technical form could you use web page contributions?
> Maybe you could just add the .html files to the git repository?

It's all done in Wordpress. Just send me translated text and I'll do the
rest.

> The "About" and "Download" pages are certainly vital to localize.

Yep.

> Keeping up with the blog-like "Home" section could be demanding, let's not
> begin with that :-)

ok

> "Bugtracker", "Building", and "Contributing" are probably not worth translating,
> as people really interested in such would probably not succeed without basic
> English skills, so I'd say a notice stating those are available only in English
> would be sufficient.
>
> "Documentation" - well, I wrote my opinion on this above :-)
>
> "Thanks" is certainly trivial to translate.

I think we have a starting point...

/D