Hello Tony, Tuesday, December 23, 2003, 9:09:15 PM, you wrote:
TM> To use an analogy, the owner's manual for my car doesn't TM> discuss how to drive, or what gasoline is, but it does tell me TM> where the gasoline tank is filled on _my car_, and it does tell me TM> about ways in which my car might handle differently from other TM> cars I'm used to. A bad analogy. Because in almost every country in the world that provides and maintains a good infrastructure for you to use a car on, you're required to have passed a driving test. Therefore, before you could take that car out onto a road to fill it up - and thus encounter all the small differences in its controls and handling that exist between it and other cars - you have to have learnt something about driving the car anyway. You may not need to know what gasoline is, but the chances are that at some point the driving instructor will have pointed out what the gasoline gauge looks like on the dash of his car. (Or whatever car you're learning to drive in.) And although you're not required to know anythng about how the car works, basic functions like gasoline, water for the windscreen (sorry - windsheild - I'm British, please bear with me if that's wrong!) wipers and oil for the car are taken "as read". The manual WILL tell you where to put water, oil, and gasoline. And amongst car owners, stories tend to be circulated about people that run out of such things - as either "I'm so dumb - guess what I did" stories, or as "I know a guy..." stories. So there is an urban grapevine that provides such information for the car owner. TM> The same is true with the manual for a typewriter. It doesn't tell TM> the user how to type, but it does tell the things about this TM> particular model of typewriter that are different from what the TM> user learned before. But a typewriter is a very basic thing. There are electric typewriters that allow you to compose entire paragraphs in a word-processor style before they'll print them - but those have manuals, which people will read because they're probably not familiar with them. And if they have used such an electric typewriter before and they switch models and do something wrong, they'll probably blame themselves for not reading the manual of the new machine. Eventually. ;-) Both these analogies have one thing in common - there are basics that are fulfilled in the case of a car or a typewriter that you either know or do not know. If you don't know them, you will be compelled to discover them. (In the first case, legally compelled.) You spoke a lot in your message of your expectations, and how The Bat! should say how it is different to the mail client you were using. A fine theory, but quite unscalable - when the manual is being written for just you, it's easy. When it's being written for five people - all of whom have used different mail clients - it becomes difficult. When it's being written for tens of thousands of people, many of whom come from different mail clients, it becomes nearly impossible. A manual must, because of this, take you from the basics towards the advanced - so that you do not have assumptions from previous software products that are actually wrong for this specific product. I agree with you that experimentation must not be necessary for users to learn software, and that most software documentation is bad. And I believe that we'd probably agree that The Bat! needs a better manual / on-line help. But I also think that the manual needs to be better organised from a complete beginner's point of view - when looked at from such a viewpoint, the current help is very poorly organised... -- Best regards, Philip mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.02 CE on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4
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