[scribus] Quicktorials

[Gregory Pittman]

On 03/03/2010 05:06 AM, a.l.e wrote:
> hi robert,
>
>> My work on the video tutorial system that can integrate into
>> application has advaced recently (http://quicktorials.org), and  I'm
>> searching for a first application to  support it.
>>
>> the idea is to place links in the application like this:
>>
>>    http://quicktorials.org/id/net.scribus=en=1.3.5=s45678=frame.image.place
>>
>> More details are described in the "Help" section of the page, but i
>> would love to get feedback or questions to answer.
>
> would it be an option to enroll as gsoc-pupil and implement your video help system for scribus in that context?
>
>
> and it's a pity, that you can't attend the next LGM. i would have loved a talk about your project!

I have reservations about the utility of this.

First of all, the overhead with this is significant (lets compare text 
or text + graphics to audio or audio + video), so that one would perhaps 
want to limit the topics to things which are not intuitive or things 
which cannot be easily discovered on ones own. How much of the content 
of this demo is not pretty obvious either intentionally with 
experimentation or by accident?

Secondly, this suffers from being what I think of as a strictly linear 
mode of learning. You cannot browse or scan the content to see what is 
in there, you have to play it back, with the video taking its own good 
time to perhaps not tell you anything that you don't already know. Even 
if you basically knew the content except for one little piece of info, 
you have to play the whole thing up to that moment to get the info you 
need. If we might imagine some more sophisticated construction, where 
the content is collated and indexed, you begin to talk about a project 
that becomes as big as Scribus itself.

It is difficult to generate something like this for both newbies and 
experienced users. Typically you must go to the lowest common 
denominator in its construction. Let's be realistic, Scribus is not a 
program that was designed to focus on the low end of the DTP user 
spectrum. Professional users won't use this kind of learning more than 
once or a fraction of once.

If there is merit to this kind of concept, it needs to be developed as a 
separate off-line project, so that the content can show its worth by 
some kind of statistical method. I also think (personally) that it's a 
horrible waste of GSoC dollars at this point.

Greg