Default Man Pages for Custom Apps

[JeremySuo]

I would like to see a feature where a designer can add a 'manual' page of sorts for specific notes on running that application. Trouble shooting tips and other basic 'Install' type document information.

A 'app history' feature would also be helpful where you could record the history of a specific application and its failures, changes etc etc.

Thanks,

Jeremy

[PeterNic]

Jeremy,

Great idea! We also should do that for appliances.

We are currently planning to add attributes for application templates and for appliance classes to store the "vendor" and "distributor" company name, incl. support contact. This can be used for URLs to the up-to-date documentation.

However, in addition, we may include the ability to store an editable text page that will be packaged with each appliance class and with each application (instance or template). I'll discuss this with the GUI team; we may use either plain text (as in man pages) or HTML (e.g., using FCKeditor, http://www.fckeditor.net/, or similar). This can be used to store documentation (e.g., similar to the data sheets that exist for the catalog appliances in the AppLogic documentation).

Can you expand a bit on the 'app history' feature (is that related to the man pages or not?)

Thanks,

-- Peter

[PeterNic]

The AppLogic 2.3 release includes the ability to store HTML notes with each instance, class and application. See the Notes tab in Instance Settings, Class Editor and Application Configuration.

Thanks for your input!

-- Peter

[digerata]

Peter,

The notes tab in 2.3.9 doesn't work with Firefox on OS X. It is blank and when you click on it, no focus is given and you can't type anything. Here is a screen shot (taken after I have tried to click in it):

(image removed to protect customer info; if you smudge the two URLs visible in the snapshot, I can return the link -- PeterNic)

[PeterNic]

digerata,

This might be somewhat unobvious -- to enter edit more, you need to double-click. Does that work on OS X?

In any case, I will send a note to engineering about the unobviousness here -- maybe a tooltip when you hover over the text "double-click to edit" on the editable windows.

Best regards,
-- Peter

[PeterNic]

digerata,

I just checked -- we have a tooltip. Either it doesn't work on OS X or you are looking at a catalog class (catalog classes are read-only, therefore you cannot modify their notes; you can, however, modify the notes of a singleton before it is put in the catalog or on appliance instances).

Which of the two?

Regards,
-- Peter

[digerata]

You are right, double clicking does work and there is a tooltip. It just takes a bit to come up. That is an awkward way to do things. Usually a button or a tab would be used to toggle mode, not double click. You normally look for tooltips over buttons and links, but not over text areas... which is the reason why I missed it in the first place.

Sorry for the false report.

[PeterNic]

digerata,

No problem. Thanks for the note -- I'll send this for review to our GUI design folks. The main idea is to keep the user interface cleaner and avoid loading the text editor code (which is not small) unless someone really wants to edit the text.

BTW, we have opened defect reports on the editor issues you sent separately, and I hope all will be resolved in our 2.4 release.

Regards,
-- Peter

[digerata]

Great, thanks!