Jolouis, interesting idea about video alternatives, but are you suggesting that people wouldn't actually film their devices being used?

What I worry about with non-video tutorials is that people won't be clear and/or accurate because they're not actually doing the task on camera directly. I often made mistakes in the text of my tutorials because the link between what I wrote and what I did wasn't a direct one.

I never made a mistake in the videos, because the videos were an exact recording of reality, and if I messed something up I had to shoot it again. Video is a great way of making you do something correctly.

Regarding annotations, the main things I'm trying to get away from are notes being added to tutorials because text will tend to assume prior knowledge, whereas the direct video of something actually being done is much more explicit about what you have to do. By forcing people to do videos instead of text, it would force people to be totally specific about how to do something, and remove the possibility of misunderstandings.


Regarding user suggestions for tutorial topics, there was some method of consumer feedback suggested ages ago, it was an open source equivalent to the uservoice.com site but I can't remember what it was called. Anyway, if you go to uservoice.com you'll see what I'm talking about. That system could perhaps do what jolouis is calling for, as it would let people suggest ideas for new tutorials and vote on other people's suggestions too.