I’ve talked about support before. And I’ve had an idea for helping people who (in particular on forums) try to provide useful support. The guys over at the Ubuntu UK Podcast were talking about the CLI vs GUI on their latest show, so I thought I’d share the idea.
The idea is, essentially, to provide an easy web interface to a big library of animated GIFs (yes - it could be videos, but GIFs are easier to embed into a forum). These GIFs would be short clips of clicking on menus and opening the various applications and settings dialogues available in Ubuntu (or your system of choice).
My plan was to build it in Django, because it, by default, has good handling of urls. So to embed a GIF of someone clicking on, say, System -> Preferences -> Keyboard, you would just embed http://www.ubuntugif/system/preferences/keyboard/ and Hey Presto! I think some would also just be images of the dialogue boxes without animation, too.
The hope would be that, because the syntax is so simple, people wouldn’t have to think about it when putting it into a support forum, and people reading the forum would be able to see actually what is supposed to happen.
So - I guess I might get around to building this at some point. If you’re interested in the project, please let me know either in the comments or via IRC
mrBen
