Spent most of my day working on the MOOZilla help documentation once again. It’s amazing how much time one can pour into writing and never get very far. Technical documentation takes a lot of work… I spend my time trying to imagine, ‘If I wanted help on the ‘Connect’ menu option… what would I want to know? It’s a pretty simple option… but if I looked in the help for it, what am I looking for? ‘.
The surprising thing is the massive amount of groth that MOOzilla will go through for it’s next release. This documentation will eventually include colourful images of MOOzilla being used in various scary ways by people. Currently I’m writing just the section on how to use MOOzilla as a MOO/MUD client, and I already have bumped the MOOzilla size up to about 290k, from its previous 75k. The documentation for how to build with MOOzilla will be very pictureful to be as useful as possible… or at least, I guess I’d like it to be.
Maybe I could make MOOzilla mock-ups using the same HTML rendering that MOOzilla uses itself. This oughta be smaller than using pictures of the rendered text…
… something about that makes me feel uncomfortable. Well, I’ll try it out when I get to the building section of the documentation.
My current feature list for 0.9.9:
- Documentation (1-2 weeks)
- Stand-Alone MOOzilla distributions for Windows and Linux. No Mozilla installation required, just gecko and other technologies bundled together. (1-2 weeks)
- Monospaced input windows, single + multi line. (2-3 days, if possible at all w/ XUL+XBL…)
- Save log as web page (1 hour)
The biggest problem with this plan for 0.9.9 is that the stand-alone distributions will be for platforms I don’t have access to. Teehee… this means MOOzilla 0.9.9 is probably planned for release around Christmas, after I do have access to an x86 computer to do some development with.