This looks quite nice. I just read it in its entirety and I think it does a good job of covering most of the bases. I noticed you haven't gotten to documenting the Winecfg feature and its options yet. I assume that is coming given its occasional importance.
One thing stood out to me which you may view as a minor point or even differ with me on but I'll mention it just the same.
I noted two places in the manual where I felt the tone of the text was unnecessarily negative or at least could be perceived in that way and potentially scare a user off somewhat.
Here is the first instance I am talking about:
"Barrel is designed to be user friendly and very easy to use, although it's making use of Wine, which is notoriously difficult to play around with."
This is the first text a user reads in the manual and is scary opening stuff for a neophyte, warning them Wine is difficult. I think the above quoted line could be rewritten to something along the lines of this to be less "scary" for new users:
Barrel is designed to make Wine much easier to use than it has been in the past with a user friendly interface, features to automate installing a new game as much as possible and online help to guide you along the way as needed.
The above text still acknowledges that Wine has been difficult to work with in the past but emphasizes how with Barrel "you too" can use Wine to play Windows games on your Mac.
Tone matters when you are dealing with some users who have already convinced themselves this is probably too hard for them to do.
Under "Manual Installation" I found the following text which I think also has issues with tone:
"there is a great possibility that the game won't run with Barrel."
This could probably be toned down a little to:
"it is possible the game may not run with Barrel. If this happens..." and here you could provide the pointer to AppDB for troubleshooting and compatibility information.
Next up:
"You should then do a "Debug run""
My question here would be, why? They only need a debug log if things go badly. And even then, what percentage of users will really be able to make heads or tails of that? Don't get me wrong. I'm glad the feature is there. For some users that will be helpful and other users will eventually benefit as the more experienced ones package up games for the less experienced using such tools. But these guys aren't even reading your manual for the most part I'd bet. Barrel is already self-explanatory to them. It is the newbies that need the documentation the most and it is probably them is should often be keeping in mind. For their first adventures in manual imports it is probably good to keep it as simple as possible and only move into tools to fix issues as needed secondarily.
Lastly for now at least:
"You will need to provide a name for the game, and choose one of the available Barrel Wine engines. Generally, the latest, the better, but there are some cases where games will run better with older engines."
Are you sure you want to direct users to use the development build which will appear in the list as the latest? I would think encouraging them to use the latest stable would be a safer bet generally speaking.
I would add to the end of that: "Sometimes you will find when looking up a game on AppDB that a particular version of Wine works best."
This just adds a little more clarity. Otherwise, I can picture a newbie wondering, "How would I know to try an older engine and which one?"
This looks quite nice. I just read it in its entirety and I think it does a good job of covering most of the bases. I noticed you haven't gotten to documenting the Winecfg feature and its options yet. I assume that is coming given its occasional importance.
One thing stood out to me which you may view as a minor point or even differ with me on but I'll mention it just the same.
I noted two places in the manual where I felt the tone of the text was unnecessarily negative or at least could be perceived in that way and potentially scare a user off somewhat.
Here is the first instance I am talking about:
"Barrel is designed to be user friendly and very easy to use, although it's making use of Wine, which is notoriously difficult to play around with."
This is the first text a user reads in the manual and is scary opening stuff for a neophyte, warning them Wine is difficult. I think the above quoted line could be rewritten to something along the lines of this to be less "scary" for new users:
Barrel is designed to make Wine much easier to use than it has been in the past with a user friendly interface, features to automate installing a new game as much as possible and online help to guide you along the way as needed.
The above text still acknowledges that Wine has been difficult to work with in the past but emphasizes how with Barrel "you too" can use Wine to play Windows games on your Mac.
Tone matters when you are dealing with some users who have already convinced themselves this is probably too hard for them to do.
Under "Manual Installation" I found the following text which I think also has issues with tone:
"there is a great possibility that the game won't run with Barrel."
This could probably be toned down a little to:
"it is possible the game may not run with Barrel. If this happens..." and here you could provide the pointer to AppDB for troubleshooting and compatibility information.
Next up:
"You should then do a "Debug run""
My question here would be, why? They only need a debug log if things go badly. And even then, what percentage of users will really be able to make heads or tails of that? Don't get me wrong. I'm glad the feature is there. For some users that will be helpful and other users will eventually benefit as the more experienced ones package up games for the less experienced using such tools. But these guys aren't even reading your manual for the most part I'd bet. Barrel is already self-explanatory to them. It is the newbies that need the documentation the most and it is probably them is should often be keeping in mind. For their first adventures in manual imports it is probably good to keep it as simple as possible and only move into tools to fix issues as needed secondarily.
Lastly for now at least:
"You will need to provide a name for the game, and choose one of the available Barrel Wine engines. Generally, the latest, the better, but there are some cases where games will run better with older engines."
Are you sure you want to direct users to use the development build which will appear in the list as the latest? I would think encouraging them to use the latest stable would be a safer bet generally speaking.
I would add to the end of that: "Sometimes you will find when looking up a game on AppDB that a particular version of Wine works best."
This just adds a little more clarity. Otherwise, I can picture a newbie wondering, "How would I know to try an older engine and which one?"