Closed roryokane closed 11 years ago
Hi Rory,
Thanks for writing these instructions. I think you're right that they were really helpful when Recursive Drawing hit HN.
In lieu of something fancier, I'm putting a link to your original instructions on the homepage.
Toby
Thanks for the link and credit, Toby.
For future reference, the link to my instructions was added in this commit: a93cc63d16e5bda3f3a3d8b625d14436c08cca61
When this app was submitted to Hacker News, I wrote a comment with textual instructions. This comment was the top-voted, with 27 points, which indicates that many people want textual instructions.
The app should show instructions somewhere. An easy place to add them is the home page, though that leaves users unable to reference the instructions while they use the app. But it’s better to put them on the home page than nowhere at all because it’s too hard to add them anywhere else. You are free to use my instructions, verbatim or edited:
In my instructions, I made each step build on the previous ones, like a tutorial, and I also covered all features of the app, like a reference. Since my instructions are a compromise between a tutorial and a reference, if you want a tutorial and a reference separately, my instructions should be adapted for each format. An interactive tutorial (shown in a floating window with a Next button) could show one paragraph per step, but it might leave some less-useful steps out so as not to bore the reader, and link to the full reference at the end. A reference might be written as bullet points instead of sentences, and have the features organized in sections – perhaps a section briefly describing the three columnar views and then one section per view describing the actions you can do in each.
The last paragraph of my instructions is a bit different from the others – it suggests tasks to give the user something to do and spark their imagination, instead of explaining a specific feature of the app – so it’s possible that you’d want to move it somewhere else.