Recently I did a talk at Boston CocoaHeads about how the Panorama X help system is implemented using Panorama itself. This talk was geared for an audience of developers, but some of you may be interested in this look “behind the curtain.” The talk is about 40 minutes, with 50 minutes of Q&A afterwards.
There have been many times that I’ve had a desire to take a break and learn about some part of Panorama X that I’ve not previously explored. I reach for the Help system and it offers a bit of insight into how a feature can add to my project, but what I believe is missing in the ‘See Also’ section is a link to a video for the particular function or statement that the reader is reading about.
ie. I’ve not ever made use of the Clone Window feature and I wanted to expore it. I imagined that it was previously explained in greater detail in a video but a search of the Panorama X Video Training page revealed no result when searching for Clone Window. I poked around and found that the Short Programming Topics Part 2 at 00:17 was a intro to the feature. Wow. If only there could have been a link on the OpenCloneWindow statement page.
If a Help page did not yet have any link for the user, an alternative ‘Suggest a Link’ could be displayed for users who have already done the research and found a relevant and useful video that they thought might be added for that subject.
One upside for all is that more users might be encouraged to purchase the extended video collection that was once offered to developers. There is so much great stuff that is in those videos that just wasn’t relevant when they were first viewed but could be a great jumping off point or an inspiration for use of a forgotten capability. I’m sure I’ve forgotten more than I’ve remembered about all of what Panorama X can do.