Exactly three years ago I was busy writing my diploma thesis - it was about a help system which showed the user directly in the application where and how to perform certain tasks. This type of help is called contextual or context sensitive help.

We had two different types of contextual help: One was bubbles that appeared next to buttons or entry fields, telling the user what to do there. The other was the mouse pointer itself, going into the application, clicking onto certain interface elements or entering text. Both types could visualise whole task sequences, not only single actions.

For my thesis I conducted a user test where the performance after learning a software with a conventional tutorial was compared to the performance after learning with that contextual help system. Of course our expectation was that users better learn a software with our new help system. But why?

When KDE moved from CVS to SVN, the old kdeextragear modules disappeared, and the extragear applications were dispersed in a number of new modules: graphics, multimedia, office, utils, etc.

Well
Following the tuff days at Conectiva ( company restructuring is always tuff ), we are finishing our next Conectiva release.
Many people know how insane and massive split package policy we have, and adding new packaging features like automatic i18n subpackages generation and auto detecting i18n install by language ( all thanks to LUA language embedded on apt ) looks like the things are become harder to manage, no ? Really no. We reach a good technology stage and a good efficiency with our small team and we do this things easily.