Hello

I'm also a little puzzled by the complete lack of documentation on the device. I think that not only the base software (Nokia provided) should have a help system but also that there should be some kind of framework (templates, directory structures, apis, ect) that would allow developers or contributors in general to easily add documentation to their applications.

I've created a brainstorm and a discussion on the topic. Please vote on the brainstorm and help get more attention to it, so that we can help to gather more interest from Nokia developers.

Brainstorm (help voting on it or its solutions):
https://maemo.org/community/brainsto...ion_framework/

Forum:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=38633

There's nothing stopping the user-community from developing its own open-source documentation, y'know.....

Perhaps the developer has hacked things together in his/her spare time, is holding down a real job to pay the bills, maybe has family, and doesn't have time to write extensive documentation. How about users try contributing something back to the open source world?

Or you could continue whining, that always get results.

For previous discussion of this topic, please see qgil's post in the "Things i really don't like..." thread.

That is exactly why I'm hoping for an "official" Maemo help framework. That way even non-programmers can contribute with the documentation. Please see the above brainstorm.

The current problem is that we don't have either documentation nor a simple standard way to add it. If there were some examples and some templates (hello-world-like) we could begin adding stuff.

I will write longer answer from my computer but it's that amazes me how thin skinned some people are. I'am just trying to help and give hints how to make things better.

At least offical programs should have proper manual online and installed on n900. It would show some example to others. And it would not hurt if there were installable help file package where everyone could EASILY do/add help/manuals.

And being polite.How polite? Define how to be polite? There is huge amount users from different cultures with different level of english so sometimes writing shortly may sound to people from for example england or usa rude.I know what's the email etiquette when writing work related posts to usa and as finnish its really really exhausting and in my opinion waste of time but yeah its cultural thing. Have to respect it and live by it.

Trying to just tell that i just want to help by whining as some people call it.

woouh wrote that with N900That was easy

It also really depends on the app.

E.g. TuneWiki - all tha would be needed would mabye one or two sentences in the app description in the dowloads section. "Add this as a widget on your desktop through the desktop menu settings. Depending on the song, the widget will either automatically roll the lyrics, or you may need to click on the < or > symbols to manually scroll the lyrics line by line." Boom. Done.

For an app like WorldTV a bit more explanation would be needed and useful (for example, if I am not mistaken, you need to double tap on the TV channel's name to start playing it). Again, even for that you should be able to just write a para or two in the app description.

Since Maemo is debian based.. if you wanted to keep with the standard the "help" files would be man pages.

Someone here said that even if man pages were added that they are removed after installation? Has maemo somehow hacked apt into kill man pages or is this just a behavior of Application Manager the GUI?

The problem you have with open source software, especially the one-developer, specific purpose applications that maemo gets loaded with because so many of us here want something quick and specific - is that developers are almost never writers.

I can write code all day.. I *hate* paperwork. I have never written a Man page.. ever =-|. Not saying that's a good thing.. just.. I hate it. My man pages are code comments =-\.

Man pages, though, have to be distributed *with* the package.. so some kind of community oriented "help" where some user picks a program and writes a man page for it - doesn't really help as the whole program needs to be re-packaged to include the man files.

But in any case.. if the App Manager kills the man pages... and Nokia has no built-in help system... that's pretty sad IMHO..

You mean "maemo" not "nokia"....yes?

The problem with built-in help (ie. docs installed alongside the app) is that you really lose control over resources. A relatively small app might actually have several megs of docs simply because it is full of helpful screenshots etc. Multiply that up and you start swamping devices with clutter.

Perhaps a standard approach might be to have an accompanying .deb with the regular install. Two .debs per app

myapp-1.0.1.deb
myapp-docs-1.0.1.deb

That way, if you're comfortable with using the software, you can dump the docs and free up some space.

There could also be a "Maemo Assistant" package, a nice doc reader, that defines a filesystem hierarchy that all the docs.deb packages could install to and get their docs automatically picked up by the reader....

That would work DAK.. but requires the "help" people to not only be able to be good writers - but also knowledge of how to "package" a debian file.

Also... did Nokia not participate in the creation of Maemo? Does nokia not support it or anything?

I'm not arguing.. you are correct that I probably should have used "Maemo".. but technically Nokia is not inaccurate. They should have put one into Maemo .

I wouldn't expect the user-community to do that. They could contribute to a wiki-like section of the project page, perhaps. I think the bundling of the docs into a .deb should be done by a member of the project.

Heck, given a standard location and hierarchy for installing such docs (with a reader), there could even be a reference template .deb with a script already present to move docs to the correct place....just drop the docs into the .deb and go

Sure Nokia runs the maemo dev show....but let's not confuse the OS with all the surrounding apps. They provide the core, and the whole vision was (as far as I can tell) for the community to make it their own. Stuff like a coherent help system falls under our responsibility - if that's what we find useful, go ahead and build it.