Notices

There is currently no official way to include documentation with apps in Maemo. I guess the paradigm is supposed to be either so easy to understand that none is needed, or a wiki or thread on maemo.org. The problem with the latter is that a typical user may have no idea of the existence of said thread or wiki page.

One option to resolve this would be to open the browser to the official app page when the app is installed. My question about this is, would such behavior bother/annoy/enrage or otherwise not be a good thing?

One nice thing about that is it would give the maintainer a way to inform the user of any new features or issues, something not possible with App Manager in its current form.

What would you think if installing an app opened up the documentation page in Maemo Browser?

Having a wiki in maemo.org for each app, would certainly make my life easier. All I had to do, is to have a "Help" button/menu that would open the wiki with Maemo Browser. As a developer, I think this would be a great idea!

As for opening the wiki automatically when installing an app, I don't think I would like that too much. Would it could do instead, is to ask whether it should be opened.

That would annoy me.

A couple of options you could have are
* Have a link to the wiki page in your about box that the user can click on.
* On first run popup a wizard or dialog which has a link to the help page.

That way the user has an easy way to get to the help page without it being too intrusive.

I'm confused. Is this a button I can click to get documentation, or an auto-pop-while-installing or somesuch optionless behavior?

I voted that it would be good but I assumed it would open release notes from a local HTML or have a help menu I can click and choose to see help, home page, vote for the package, etc. Auto-popping stuff without asking would be bad.

Also, including a vote for package link would make our(my?) life WAY easier than digging for the package.

Perfect idea. This will help in figuring out the apps that have absolutely no info about what they do and how they can be configured.

Same here.

Seems that first run is the time for doing this, then. The advantage of doing it on install would have been (1) that an Internet connection can be assumed and (2) that some standard method could have been implemented. I can see it could be annoying, however.

Thanks for your comments and votes.

Doing it on first run is just as bad. A program should do what it is supposed to do, not open unnecessary windows. For help there is help menu.

Not a single one of my three apps in Extras has a help menu...

Not all apps need a menu, but all apps have release notes that may be important. Previous versions of App Manager supported a custom control file field that would show upgrade notes, but that is not supported, so i'm trying to find the best alternative.