As Andreas points out, improving the user experience may be a better use of time in the short term than recruiting new users. Manuals and wikis and other resources are great, but the closer the documentation/help is to the point of use, the more effective it will be for users. We've got tool tips in a lot of places, but context sensitive help would be a very useful addition. Having the app include a live link to the online manual or even including the manual in the download would be a good interim measure.
Doing a good demo involves a lot more than speaking English (or any other language) well. If you've ever seen a really good demo and a really bad demo, you know what a big difference there can be. A screencast is basically just a recorded demo, so you need a good demo and a good demoer to start with. Of course, you can use editing to allow for multiple takes which can make things a little easier than doing it live, but editing is more work too, so it's a tradeoff. For a great demo, which includes ArgoUML by the way, check out Sean Kelly's "Getting Your Feet Wet With Plone" where he starts with a bare operating system, then downloads, builds, and installs Python, Zope, Plone, Archetypes, ArchGenXML, and ArgoUML, then uses those to build a time tracker web application and deploys it all *live* in under 20 minutes. http://www.archive.org/details/SeanKellyGettingYourFeetWetwithPlone (The ArgoUML part starts at about 11:15) The key thing about good demos is that they tell a story. The types of people who are interested in reverse engineering may be the same as people who are just learning UML or modeling, which implies multiple demos to highlight different uses of the tool. Just going through the various features one by one will be boring and make for a poor demo. BTW, there are some other ArgoUML related screencasts around. Bogdan did an ArgoEclipse screencast for the 2006 Google Summer of Code http://argoeclipse.tigris.org/documentation/video/screencast.html and there were some screencasts on YouTube in Portugese about the collaborative version of ArgoUML that a Brazilian student did (search for ArgoUML on YouTube). Tom --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
