Help Off-line

I have pointed you to this link at the first day you visited this forum. You just kept saying how bad is the help organized.
I have also pointed you to the offline help viewer, which I guess you didn't check.

Erel - thanks for your quick replies. I think HELP and documentation (or perhaps I should use word: manual) in general are not the same things. As far as help on the page listed above I really like it, and I did look at it briefly while ago, but this help will not tell me basics how things are organized and how the whole idea of B4A works. This is more lkie a Language Reference (and I'm glad it is there). Somehow couple times when I tried to use is I landed on the German version,..not even sure why (but perhaps there was my mistake), and this is not so important at the moment.

If you saw the comment (from another user) about your sample application for beginners (GuesNumber or something like that) you should probably know what I mean. This example and the tutorial was great, but average new user (unless he is coming from VB) after this step need something a little bit more advanced,.. then more advanced etc. If the person will just follow those (ie. 3-5 examples which could add more and more advanced features) at some point would be ready to fly on his own, and that is the time to go and use your on-line Language Reference system (for the classes and methods), which as I said I like.

The documentation for beginners however could be better. I posted some HOW TOs in some other thread on this forum and having answers or instructions to those would help me a lot.
The PDF file you pointed me to is good, but it is missing some stuff that I would like to see and learn there. If you take my remarks not as destructive criticism, but rather helpful hints to make in general your product better I would appreciate.

Can I use help of-line ?

Arthur

The help viewer is available here: http://www.b4x.com/forum/basic4andr...viewer-view-search-documentation-offline.html

I guess this could come down to a debate about who the help is for.

I think the help is (and should be) for people who have experience in basic programming, but need guidance on how this particular language is structured, if you know the basics of Basic then the tutorials will get you up and running in no time.

The OP seems to be after a step by step guide for users that are completely new to programming.

I would say that there are a lot of generic programming guides out there, and Erel (and his team) can spend his time more productively than rehashing them.

OK, I downloaded this file yesterday, just didn't know it could work off-line. Great concept - Thanks!
just one more question. Is the contents of the HelpViewer updated automatically (when on-line help changes) ?

Arthur

thanks for your opinion,
you are right up to some point with that,..but assuming the product is only for people who know Basic language is wrong. If one doesn't know what the IF THEN ELSE structure is, then you are right, he probably should reach to the general programing languages books, but if someone came from COBOL for example and never used VB, then must find some information how to use the tool. The language reference part of B4A is fine, I'm not complaining about it at all, but the general information to grasp the idea of how the IDE along with libraries and implementation of the Classes and methods could be greatly improved. I'm glad there are some user developed examples to study (but it is to early to share my opinion about that).
The problem here is two-fold. Everybody who is more than a beginner wants new features, and everybody who is a beginner wants to learn as much as possible in the shortest possible time frame. That creates a little conflict of interests. There has to be a balance. If there is not, then either the tool advancement will be slow, or the user accumulation will be slow which in turn make the product die after some months or years (and believe me I've seen that several times happen). Marketing and managing a product is not an easy job, and if somebody is a great person and top notch developer working on the tool advancement like a horse, doesn't necessarily mean success in a long run. it all depends on the management skills which are as important as programing.
The answer to the question how the new user supposed to learn using the product is a matter of speculation and there are probably many different opinions, as everybody is different and has his own preferred methods.
In my opinion the documentation cold be aimed for people who:

- came from other than Basic programing languages (Assembler, C++, cobol, Forthran, Pascal, C#, Clarion, W, PHP, AS400, JS, Java, Batch, CShell, etc. and not all those languages are O.O.)

- those who used VB and alike (and I understand those people will have probably the least problem to grasp all this)

- those who never written any code anything (and here sending them to 3rd party tutorials will be absolutely OK)

Now base on the group the user is coming from there should be different methods to introduce that user to the product, and most of all make him happy developer. There are those who love to code, and there are those who want the job done ASAP, there are those who used pretty basic tools in the past (and did lots of coding - so they don't mind more coding), and there are those who did very little coding (because of the advanced 4GL tools they used, which did not require writing that much code). VB as a development platform is not the top of the line ins sense of productivity and this is known fact. I decided to use B4A simply because I haven't found anything better (although I know there are several tools under development now), or those I have found were pretty expensive.

Arthur
:sign0104:

Looking at your 3 types of user:

- came from other than Basic programing languages (Assembler, C++, cobol, Forthran, Pascal, C#, Clarion, W, PHP, AS400, JS, Java, Batch, CShell, etc. and not all those languages are O.O.)

Click to expand...

I would think that people with programming knowledge would have at least a passing knowledge of basic, and be aware enough to be able to find the details of the commands they need. (I am in this category)

- those who used VB and alike (and I understand those people will have probably the least problem to grasp all this)

Click to expand...

Same as the group above

- those who never written any code anything (and here sending them to 3rd party tutorials will be absolutely OK)

Click to expand...

These people really need to find a good, generic introduction to programming with basic. I personally feel it is expecting too much from the dev team to produce an instruction manual for this category, especially as it is an area that is covered a lot on other sites and in print.

As far as I can see, this tool was not produced - and is not really suitable - for people who want to develop apps with no knowledge of programming.

@aklisiewicz

I might not agree with you on everything you wrote but I do admit that you have some valid points.

However, we should consider that B4A is a "young" product (October 2010 ??) and I think Erel must (had to) develop it including support for most features that Android offers so it is possible to use B4A to write all kind of applications for Android. Then, although I am not sure, Erel works on his own and to create documentation all alone must (or will) take him ages.

With that said, I believe Erel has choosen the right way to build and market a new product/project such as B4A. The product must be usable before you can advertise it. What is currently missing in B4A in order to make it compete on par with Java/Eclipse, I guess is the Widget-support. Other missing things can probably be added by users or other developers using libraries.

Once this stage has been completed, I agree with you that Erel should concentrate or dedicate some more time on user-documentation, such as a manual (reference-material is already mostly complete) for new users. This will surely benefit B4A. If I recall, Erel had a collaborator once who wrote a manual for B4PPC available for download on this site. The end result could be a similar manual. Also the WIKI-project is nice.

In the meanime and as many people have already suggested, there are tons of tutorials made by Erel covering most aspects of Android-programming with B4A. Start with these tutorial and develop your code from there. If you get stuck, just ask in the forum.