Help with documentation, screen casts and tutorials

Development
#1

Hi,

Geoff and I were talking earlier, and it looks like the Avogadro code
base is in pretty good shape, our bug count is quite low and the bugs we
see all look reasonable. There are certainly some issues we need to work
on before the release, but the big area we still really need to work on
is documentation.

Now that our UI and strings are frozen this is a great time to improve
our documentation. We think the best approach is to draft out the
documentation on our wiki, and then push this into docbook format for
distribution with Avogadro. We would like to appeal to all of our
developers, and interested users to help us flesh out the documentation
on the wiki.

Things that would be helpful are picking a tool and writing a tutorial,
along with screenshots to guide new users through, activity based
tutorials such as molecule building and screen casts. These should be
done using trunk, or >=0.9.5 release. Please skip any surface/orbital
tutorials until I have finished off the new dialog.

It would also be great to hear what forms of documentation people find
most valuable, what features you feel need the most documentation. The
more help you guys can give us with documentation, the more time we can
spend polishing the code and fixing the remaining bugs.

Thanks,

Marcus

PS Quick bit of personal news - I have been very quiet this last week as
my son William was born on Tuesday of last week. Only now starting to
come back down to earth and get back into some development work. Please
excuse me if I am a little slower than normal in replying to mails.

#2

We would like to appeal to all of our developers, and interested
users to help us flesh out the documentation
on the wiki.
…
Things that would be helpful are picking a tool and writing a
tutorial,
along with screenshots to guide new users through, activity based
tutorials such as molecule building and screen casts.

I should mention that I just did a semi-automated screenshot dump of
menus and dialogs into the wiki.
http://avogadro.openmolecules.net/wiki/Documentation

At this point, it’s pretty easy to pick a page at random (http://avogadro.openmolecules.net/wiki/Special:Random
if you want) and add some documentation text. I will certainly do
little bits at a time over the next 2 weeks. I will also make sure to
add screenshots for tool & display settings, etc.

I think the most important is to update the step-by-step tutorials and
screencasts. Anything with old screenshots should be re-done.
http://avogadro.openmolecules.net/wiki/Screencasts
http://avogadro.openmolecules.net/wiki/Tutorials

There are over 50 people on this list. If each person puts in 5
minutes, we’ll draft quite a lot of documentation!

Cheers,
-Geoff