My interest stems also from the fact that I am currently working on a project which deals with the organising, sorting and presenting of information. A personal, well I hate the word assistend in this context, but it will serve you well. It should even learn from the way you interact with the program and the way you organise information in yor head, the way you think.
The funny thing is even if you have all the facts, this doesn't mean you understand or are able to use, the information. If your internal representation of the facts isn't in the right way for YOU, then the facts mean didtly to you. In that case your not able to combine the facts in a way that makes sense to YOU. This is something I find very often amiss in manuals and teaching books.
While I was still in school I very quickly became aware that not so much learning was important but understanding. Most people "learned" algebra, mathematics, physics or chemestry. Well guess what, the moment you understand a certain principle you don't need to memorize and "learn" a lot. Since you understand what's going on you can always deduce the facts again when you need them.
More over it doesn't matter that much if you forget the facts, which you tend to to over time, you can recreate them again and again.
Teachers and manuals, which act as a sort of teacher, don't they, should be keenly aware of this fact.
It's about understanding and the CONNEXION between the different pieces of information is the vihicul and the means to do this. Facts in itself have very little informational value. This is one of the "flaws" of the documantation. I know there is a popUp with related topics in the documentation but that's not quite the same as what I am saying. The what's related feature, is just a list of simular topics. It doesn't explicitly try to make a broader understanding available to the reader.
People tend to learn in many different ways and use different strategies to do it. Some people learn by what's different from what they know, others by what is the same, the likeness. Some are very visual and without explicit pictures they have a hard time to learn, others like step by step instrucions. Manuals should be made to exploit all these different features people use to learn. Unfortunatly this is very exeptional. (I hope I'll do it right)
There is yet another very important aspect about information and facts. The meaning of everything, litteraly everything, depends on the context. Change the context and you change the meaning. This means that the cross conexions between information are at least as important as the information itself, since information without context is no information at all. Those very small very specific exampless, have not much informational value. Examples should be "real world" working demonstrations of a principle. Since it's more than just a specific fact it wil automaticly show, and 'teach' other principles as well along the way. Personaly I learn best from "real live" examples and I believe this works for a lot of people.
Having said all this, I am putting the last hand on a I believe a much needed tutorial about scrolling. For the project I am working on I needed a huge "virtual" space where liturally hundreds of different objects can be moved around and interacted upon. (I sure hope revolution can handle this) So I needed a scrolling card and a lot of features for the scrolling.(automatic expanding in 3 directions and blocking in the fourth) It took me an awfull lot of time to get this working. (no examples that I found about this kind of scrolling Simply scrolling a picture is no problem, in fact it's trivial, but if you need more complex possibility's and features, well take a deep breath 'cause you're in for quite a journy or . . . . . . . wait a couple of days and read my tutorial as I will make my discovery's available to all. I think these kind of things should be standart examples 'cause a lot of programs could benefit from it or indeed tare dependend on this feature. Like it is now we all have to invent the wheel by ourself, wich seems to me a kind of waist of time.
I have a couple of other ideas for tutorials, namly hings I stumble on myself while developing my app and learning revolution. (tricks with groups, selecting multiple objects by clicking or drawing a marquee around them and my adventure with trying to take a OOP apraoch to creating objects even with inheritance and all. I don't know wether it will work but I certainly gonna try this, 'cause I could use it.)
As soon as this first tutorial is presentable I'll post the link on this list, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel again, when you need somemore complex scrolling done.
In the mean time happy programming Claudi
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