[Coco] First experiences with my DE1

[Mark McDougall]

On 17/02/2014 10:50 AM, Al Hartman wrote:

> I don't agree.  I wrote the user interface and the manual for the CoCo
> Greeting Card Designer, and many other Zebra products.

It really comes down to the complexity - and target audience - of the 
product. A well-written piece of shrink-wrap software with an intuitive UI, 
targeted to the desktop user (and I'm going to assume your software falls 
into this category) is a lot easier to write a manual for.

Coco3FPGA, OTOH, runs on a 3rd party development board using 3rd party 
software on a more-or-less bare PCB full of buttons and switches. Sure it's 
possible for the developer to document, but it's also much easier to assume 
some piece of knowledge that isn't perhaps that intuitive to the reader.

Either way, the 'manual' or 'guide' or 'how-to' should be reviewed by a 
'noob' 3rd party. At work we write build instructions for all our 
development projects and standard practise is to have another engineer who 
hasn't worked on the project, sit down and do a build from scratch following 
the instructions. If they can't, then the documentation is inadequate.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"