A real and serious Fuse manual / guide is needed

General
1

I really like the new approach that Fuse is giving to Android/iOS programming. Fuse may truly establish a new standard within the alternatives to Java or Objective C programming for mobile applications. For this reason, in my opinion, the Fuse team should seriously invest into a real printable manual/guide that covers all Fuse aspects and features.

The manual should be aimed both to beginners and to advanced users. If you want to attract all those users that would like to start programming mobile apps but up to now never decided because frightened by the known difficulties, it is very important that the parts of the manual intended to beginners are written in a very simple and easy step by step way. Beginners must be guided from absolute beginning to a first complete project. When a beginner is satisfied and appeased because he has understood new concepts and new techniques, and he is now aware of the potential he has, you may be pretty sure he will be a loyal user of Fuse.

The presence of a manual concurs to strengthen the life cicle, the seriousness and the passion which is behind the Fuse project.

2

I agree, i learnt from the DOCS option above and the Fuse’s youtube videos but i think it is not complete.

3

I think the old docs provided more in-depth explanation of everything compared to the new form of docs. I have a saved HTML doc of the old one and while it is out-dated it makes learning it a lot easier. However the new docs do have some great material to them, but just low explanation towards most of the content.

4

Hey Enrico,

Thanks for your comments! Rest assured we are indeed continously working in improving our documentation, examples etc. I can’t guarantee that they’ll be in printed form, at least not in the current iteration, but that’s simply because we’re still in beta and things are still prone to changes, and we don’t want deprecated information to still be in active use. :slight_smile:

As for the guide vs reference point, that’s an important part of the work we’re doing on documentation. Our first docs were actually almost exclusively a reference guide. It didn’t quite work the way we wanted it to, for reasons you point out too: no learning curve, just reference information you had to search for.

Our second attempt was the previous handbook, which while pretty successful in giving in-depth knowledge of the topics it covered, and providing a certain vertical reading guide, it didn’t succeed in including all the searchable references required for a good, solid piece of documentation. Especially on something as wide-reaching as Fuse, where we not only have JavaScript and UX markup, but also the underlying Uno layer which need to be tied into the story at logical places as well.

This is why the current iteration of our documentation is set up the way it is. We will keep adding more guide-like sections to it, the search will get better, and each topic in the reference guide is improved every single day. In fact, we’ve shifted major parts of the documentation writing to be part of the code authoring process (so that important segments have documentation inlined and this is in turn published as generated docs).

Part of what makes writing documentation so hard is that no user is alike. Some come at Fuse in desperate need of a step-by-step starting guide, and some not only don’t want it, but get irritated by it because they feel it talks down to them. Granted, those are the two extremes and there are a thousand variations in between, but having those extremes makes it impossible to settle on One Right Way™ to write, publish and update our docs. :slight_smile:

So to summarize: we know it’s not good enough, it will get better. :slight_smile: Thanks for sticking with us even though we’re not perfect, we really appreciate it!

5

I think that adding Fuse as a language to DevDocs.io would be really great. Especially since DevDocs has a great search function that makes it really easy to find what I’m searching for instantly.

6

Yeah, we’ve gotten this suggestion before, but as I’ve outlined above, the problem isn’t getting the docs in different formats, but rather to make sure that they’re good docs to begin with. Exporting or sharing the written documentation it something we’ll look at when they reach an appropriate level of maturity.

7

Hi @bent, i think one of the big problems of the new docs is the search. Usually i can’t find what i’m looking for, so i have to go to the old doc to use the browser search.