Re: Help menu position

[Hans Ronne <hronne at comhem dot se>]

>Hi,
>
> The conventional "help" menu position on any interactive application
>is generally on the rightmost position on the top menu bar.
>
>I actually did play for quite some time before discovering the help
>system. I generally dont follow the practise of exploring every menu
>option, like 98% of users I would say.
>
>Once it is realised that getting help is simply a matter of pressing a
>"?", then there is no issue of course. However it is important to follow
>conventions for beginning players especially.

Good point. I never understood why Stan put the Help in the File menu. BTW,
in the Mac PPC interface it's in the Apple menu (where it doesn't belong
either) so things are really confused.

A separate Help menu is an excellent idea. There are two things to
consider, however. First, as Eric pointed out, the menu should do something
more than just open the Help system. Otherwise, it is really a waste of
menubar space. What would make sense (and be relatively easy to code) is to
load all the help nodes. That way you could access help on any specific
item more quickly.

Another problem is that a system-level help menu already exists on the Mac
(both in the tcltk and PPC interfaces) and this is where the Xconq help
really should go according to conventions. And we certainly don't want two
menus named "Help" - that if anything will confuse the user. So the Mac
must be treated separately in the tcl code. I'm not sure how to get the
system Help menu from within tcl, but it should be possible.

A third point is that the help system already is more integrated with the
game in the Mac PPC interface. You can ctrl-click on any unit to bring up a
small floating unit info window, and in this window there is a Help button
which brings you directly to the relevant help node. We may want to
implement something similar in the tcltk interface. But that does not rule
out a Help menu - we could have both.

Hans