It does get a bit ridiculous though. There's entire sites and content creators focused solely on VS Code tips. At what point are we gonna end up with engineers working on adding a feature to VS Code that they didn't know already existed?
I don't think those have ever come up at the right time, usually only when I'm halwfway in the middle of an action, and not in the headspace for a tutorial or tip.
And that tiny little tooltip, that offers no screenshot or example gif isn't going to get me to learn.
If anyone knows how to invoke this feature, I’d love to know. Just not enough to try to find out from checking more than about three search results. Anyway, ahhh discoverability. I remember you…
† Typed these on mobile, of course. Android, in case you're wondering.
If you enable that, each key on the keyboard now shows an additional symbol you can get to by long press, for example, 'a' now also allows you to type '@'. If you try and long press for 'a' you'll suddenly see that accented versions of 'a' are also available. And that's the story of how I "naturally" discovered that same feature.
For “consumer” software I usually don’t need manuals, I can find what I need via poking; this often includes power user features (when I use something sufficiently often).
Is it possible that what you’re feeling is nostalgia? Have you actually read the manual for your phone?
I have, and it’s abysmal, because it doesn’t make any attempt at explaining anything on a conceptual level, or even explaining basic UI elements. It doesn’t teach you how to interpret what you see on the screen. It does the bare minimum of enumerating the steps to activate a given feature, presuming that you are able to match those descriptions to what you see on the screen (there are barely any screenshots) and that you know why you would want to use that feature in the first place. It also doesn’t address any failure modes, and doesn’t discuss relevant considerations regarding the use of the given feature.
https://www.oreilly.com/search/?query=missing+manual&formats...
Then again, today’s smartphone operating systems are as popular as home appliances in the 90s.
Maybe if we took something modern that is as niche as software in the 90s then it might come with a manual with a mental model too.
But of course, there’s a phone app you can download and give the company a bunch of personal information to connect your washer to your home network so you can get notification when it’s done with its cycle.
Now they're developing products for themselves. No customer ever asked for a TV that plastered the screen with ads every time they adjusted the volume, or a lightbulb you need some shitty app to turn on and off, but now it seems everything comes with some kind of hidden monkey paw style gotcha attached to it.
- 2020s appliances (throw away manuals) are like 90s hardware toolbox (throw away manuals)
- 2020s smartphones (easy to understand manuals) are like 90s appliances (easy to understand manuals)
- 2020s specialized tools (manuals with mental models) are like 90s computers (manuals with mental models)
This make some sense for Web Product development where you want to find a market fit, VC and media were all over it. But it doesn't work as well for Desktop and other type of Apps. Or in System Programming.
And it is funny we start seeing push back against it 10 - 15 years later.
Except we’re really not. Tools like container registries, software dependencies on remote repos, and cheap infrastructure have brought the fast half-baked iteration to systems programming, desktop apps, etc.
https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/welcome-to-live/
Wish more software companies were this thorough.
The problem with this is that you don’t learn any new features that you wouldn’t have come up with on your own.
I loved reading the well-written manuals and “on-line” (integrated into the software) help of the 90s (and 80s) that explained all the concepts and features of the particular software. You’d learn a ton of new ideas and possibilities. It was really fun and exciting, and it gave you the perception of a well-designed and well thought-out whole. You built up a consistent mental model of the software, and you thus ended up with the feeling of mastery and control over the software.
Nowadays it feels more like poking the software with a stick in an attempt to build a mental model and discover its capabilities by trial and error, often remaining in doubt about the actual intent of how exactly things are supposed to work.