Topic: minor change to make popup help more useful

Good idea Mike! A small dedicated area would be cool…like a status bar. With this I would probably never disable “popup help” so there is maybe no need for a shortcut.

The popup help is indeed very useful but sometimes it occludes some important parts.

@UncleAge wrote:

This suggestion is something I have always liked in Ableton’s Live. Live has a small, context sensitive, help-box in the lower left-hand corner that you can collapse when not needed. However, if it showed up in a status bar instead that would be ok too.

Yes, I was going to say the same thing, so +1 to that.

Mart.

+1

I thought,a while ago, about having both pop up help and a pop up Manual,it would obviously take up more sceen space,but it’s easy to turn it on/off and easier to navigate than the pdf version.
not sure what it would do to the code size,but many of the entries could be copied and pasted from Frit’s explanations of new features posted here on the forum.
I dont know much about writing manuals, but would it remove the work involved in contents/chapter list ,page renumbering,indexing, deleting out of date manual entries etc?

mart.

I could add two new options in the help menu below the current “Popup Help”: “Show Help Box In Inspector Panel” and “Show Help Box In List Panel”.

The help box will appear at the bottom like the example from Live. You would need to have either the inspector or the list panel open to show the help box. Having the two show options allows you to select which panel you would prefer the help box to appear in. If both options are enabled then the help box is shown in whatever panel is open, but of course only one help box is shown if both the inspector and list panel are open.

@Mike G wrote:

1 – Hmmm. If “popup” help is now moving into a fixed window, how about adding links from the bottom of “popup” help entries to one or more relevant main help topics on the internet wiki help?

Good idea about shortcuts to the wiki guide. However it won’t work with buttons or links in the help box, as the displayed help content would change if you try to move the mouse to the help box to click a link. It has to be a key shortcut you can press when your mouse is over a specific control element you want wiki help for. The help box could still show when wiki help is available, such as “Alt+F1: Piano roll editor”. The help menu would have a “Enable wiki links in help box” option, so that users that are not connected to the internet are not bothered with the links.

2 – Also I hope the popup help boxes that you suggested fritz will not callapse away like the existing panels in the inspector and/or list box. i.e. I hope I can still see the help even when I’ve got the device panel picked in the inspector (Hope that makes sense)

It won’t collapse. There will be a draggable horizontal divider between the help box and the inspector. Similar to the vertical divider between the inspector and the project page.

3 – How does anyone else feel about the podium community doing some updates to the help docs.
I’ve not played with it as yet but am I right in saying members can edit the wiki help?
I could probably spare up to a day for doing some updates to it.
We could do the bulk of the work and fritz could just review/edit/polish it. I was thinking save his time so he can write more code and give us more features! (If you’re anything like me fritz, also a software dev, you prefer to write code than document it!)
Fritz could make a list of items needing updates and we could take a piece and update it or something like that…

All registered forum users can edit the wiki. So far user “piltdown man” has been the only other major contributor to the guide. You can click the “recent changes” button at the top of the wiki page to see the latest additions. I’d be glad if more people would contribute. I recommend that people coordinate contributions by discussing it on the forum first.

@Mike G wrote:

If I was going to try and update something (just so I can see how long it takes me!), where should I start?

If you can wait a few days until 2.09 is released, then a good place to start would be the new piano roll editor features. I think it would be fantastic if contributors could gather up the bits and pieces of info that I scribble in the preview and release topics, and write it into the wiki pages.

It would also hopefully be easier for contributors to write about the most recent feature additions, while it is still fresh in memory from the forum preview discussions.