Hi everyone,

Jan Smith created one more Flash Tutorial which shows how to create screenshots under Microsoft Windows. (If someone wonders where the other flash tutorial is: I added it under: http://docs.gimp.org/help.html - It describes how to setup a sandbox under Microsoft Windows).

I wonder where we want to place the tutorials, because gimp.org already offers a bunch of tutorials. Should I create a new page on docs.gimp.org or do we want to place the flash tutorials on gimp.org?

Greetings,

On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 10:47:16PM -0700, Manish Singh wrote:

On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 09:39:55AM +0200, Roman Joost wrote:

Jan Smith created one more Flash Tutorial which shows how to create screenshots under Microsoft Windows. (If someone wonders where the other flash tutorial is: I added it under: http://docs.gimp.org/help.html - It describes how to setup a sandbox under Microsoft Windows).

Honestly, though documentation contributions are nice, flash totally sucks for documentation. You can't share or bookmark points in the middle of tutorial. You can't search for text in it, and neither can search engines.

Thats a problem with Flash and you have a point here. For me the tutorials are just another medium of pointing out how things work. Jimmac made in the early days of GIMP 2.0 videos which where greatly accepted by the users. Why not Flash as well?

Is it, because Flash is a propriatory format? The licenses to create the contributions are already paid, so why not use what we have to make things easier for users?

Looking at the content in this case (your permissions are broken, Roman), I don't see any added value that animation brings.

Thanks for the hint about the permissions - fixed them already :)

Greetings,

On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 12:21:06AM -0700, Manish Singh wrote:

On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 08:03:49AM +0200, Roman Joost wrote:

tutorials are just another medium of pointing out how things work. Jimmac made in the early days of GIMP 2.0 videos which where greatly accepted by the users. Why not Flash as well?

Animation and video are good for demos and advertising. If you want to see a cool demo of how jimmac uses GIMP, it's great. If you want to actually follow along, refer back to it parts of it later, search through it, or discuss finer points of it with others on mailing lists, irc, etc., it sucks. It's not really effective *documentation*.

Thats the same with the flash movie. It is definitely not the intention to replace our documentation by flash tutorials. It's just a different way of telling people how things work. Thats all ... nothing more ...

If it's important enough to be documented, it's important enough to be put in a useful format. Other formats are secondary.

Sure - but whats 'useful'? The average user might have a total different understanding about what is useful for him than what is useful for us as developers. I think users probably don't care which format the content is distributed unless they can access it. This could be really bad or good some times ...

This flash video especially, the content is so much better done as a static tutorial. Who wants to keep hitting pause if you don't follow along fast enough, or twiddle your thumbs while you wait for it catch up with you? Like I said, the animation adds no value.

Sure, but it's now a Flash and not a static tutorial. Jan put time in creating those movies and afterwards we're discussing what will be the best format to distribute the content.

Why not making them available and let the public decide if it's good or bad for them?

I sometimes have the feeling that contributions were discussed to death, instead of placing them somewhere people can find and improve them afterwards.

Greetings,

On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 12:13:09PM -0700, Manish Singh wrote:

On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 10:41:52AM +0200, Roman Joost wrote:

If it's important enough to be documented, it's important enough to be put in a useful format. Other formats are secondary.

Sure - but whats 'useful'? The average user might have a total different understanding about what is useful for him than what is useful for us as developers. I think users probably don't care which format the content is distributed unless they can access it. This could be really bad or good some times ...

This flash movie seemed to be aimed at developers....

Let me care about documentation contributors and how we try to get other people involved. If everyone think, that this is a very bad approach (no one else raised his voice so far), then I've no problem to remove the flash introductions.

I was just asking if it is possible to put flash tutorials for new _users_ between the other tutorial content on the GIMP page.

Why not making them available and let the public decide if it's good or bad for them?

I sometimes have the feeling that contributions were discussed to death, instead of placing them somewhere people can find and improve them afterwards.

I feel what belongs on official GIMP pages should have some baseline standards, just like what goes in the codebase has to live up to a standard of code quality.

What's next after Flash? Word documents?

Do we still fight the war against the evil proprietary software? I mean, if the GIMP project strictly forbidds using any proprietary software (incl. libraries, formats whatsoever), than you have a point and we can stop this discussion. Otherwise I still can't see the point what is wrong about using Flash as a different media for helping users ...

Greetings,

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 10:34:25AM +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:

I don't see much problem with having tutorials in Flash, but I think that the user manual is the wrong place for them. For one, the help browser can't display flash. Also, currently the user manual is more of a book than a multimedia presentation and I think that is a good format for a manual. That doesn't say that there couldn't be any multimedia add-ons but I would put them on the website (www.gimp.org or docs.gimp.org) and just point to them from the user manual. That would also keep the download size for the manual more reasonable.

Heh, Sven - you're speaking out of my heart. Exactly that was my/our intention: adding the flash tutorials to a webpage and not including them in any help browser. Or let them replace the written manual. I was intended to have it like a 'give-away' :)

Greetings,

Hi Marco,

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 11:03:58PM +0200, Marco Ciampa wrote:

More: I can't see any flash tutorial at all on my linux-64bit station. :-(

I guess you will in the future ...

Please use some standard file format, I'm very interested in gimp video tutorials!!!

Sure - you're encouraged to provide video tutorials. Although, the main disadvantages on videos are the big file size :(

Please use wink!

http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

aeh... wink produces flash files? Whats the difference?

Greetings,