It would be very helpful to have the help option or tutorial available when you first start up the program. When I first loaded Scrivenger, I was very confused by the initial screen and lack of the help menu I was told would be there. I eventually realized that I had to ‘create’ a document first in order to access the help menu and then the tutorial. I recommend having the help tutorial pop up the first time you use it, or at least having the help menu as one of the options on the opening screen.
Still working through the tutorial, but so far this seems like a very handy tool.
You’ve got a very good point there actually. I’m the Mac developer, and the Windows version is based on the Mac version. When I first read your e-mail, I was thinking, “Eh, what? You just go to the Help menu and…” And then Julia (Jaype) pointed out to me that things are different on Windows… On the Mac, the menu appears at the top of the screen, regardless of whether a project is open or not. But on Windows, the menu is part of a project window. This is a difference between OS X and Windows, and it’s something we hadn’t considered. So you are absolutely right - this is currently a problem for the Windows version that doesn’t affect the Mac version, and we’ll need to think this through.
I think the best solution would be to have the tutorial available from the new projects panel, which I think is pretty much what you are suggesting. I’ll need to talk about this with Lee and see what he thinks, too. Many thanks for bringing this to our attention - it’s the sort of thing that is obvious to a user but can sometimes get missed by us developers simply because we’re too close to the details sometimes.
I wonder if perhaps integrating it into the template Misc system might be the best way? Then it gets created just like a normal project and doesn’t clutter up the interface for veteran users. It could, like the NaNo version does on the Mac with the NaNo template, auto-select the tutorial on the first run.
That’s not a bad idea. I was actually thinking of doing that with the Mac version (and may still do so in a future version), but I figured having it in the Help menu is a more obvious place; definitely worth considering as a solution for the Windows version though.