plasma and documentation

As Ade has been blogging over the last few days, Shane-of-FSFE has been working his way through KDE4.

Shane notes what is currently our biggest achiles heel for users: documentation. The website is woefully out of date, there is no user documentation to speak of, and even our techbase tutorials are lagging. It's really pathetic and I feel really bad about the situation.

We've been busy coding and arting (is that a word? =) and bug fixing and communicating and strategizing and ... all the things that go into making the product rock. But this has come at the expense of any documentation being written.

We do have a FAQ hidden away in our developer coordination wiki page that is being kept up by a fearless band of wikiers (is that a word?!) but really that's just not enough.

Plasma introduces a number of rather new (for the end user, anyways) concepts and we're really adding a whole pile more in 4.1. We're finally getting to the point where the vision is starting to be visible.

But the documentation isn't there to support it. For 4.2 we must have user documentation, developer tutorials and that welcome plasmoid that tells the user things like "hey, those cashews you see? you can configure things with them!" It should then let you click on an action pad that will cause the cashews to throb a bit so the user notices them.

This will be a major goal for 4.2, just as getting panel configuration, scriptability, WoC and krunner together was for 4.1.

But until then, I humbly offer my public apologies to all the users out there who we've completely screwed over by the lack of documentation. *sob* *grovel*

To Shane: I appreciate your patience and I've been watching your blog. Much love, I'll try and repay it in words.

I'm considering going away for a week this fall to somewhere nice and quiet (forests? mountains? rivers? oceans?) and do nothing but write in solitude.

And in case you are wondering, I have no time until 4.1.0 is out to walk anyone through things to make Plasma docu possible.

p.s. Shane: The P-man has three stickers on his laptop so far: two are KDE themed and the third one is the FSFE logo. Keep on rocking in the Free world! =)