After publishing Kitty Todo to the Play Store earlier this month, I’ve been doing various things to support and promote it. Last week I put up the Kitty Todo web site, and I’m happy to say that the site now includes a help page, with topics on Kitty Todo basics, tips, and questions.
On one hand I’ll say that using Kitty Todo is very intuitive and self-explanatory, but on the other hand I think it’s always good to have well-rounded documentation for your software, even in these days when software typically comes via a tap on an Install button rather than a box full of manuals, and is run on devices that don’t have F1 keys for bringing up screens of context-sensitive help.
In addition to the obvious reasons for having it, help/documentation provides more opportunities to talk about both the concrete day-to-day experiences of using your software and the philosophy of the software, and how they both can easily and pleasantly fit into and improve people’s lives. And for people who haven’t installed the app and are wondering whether they’d like to try it, more for them as well!
I’ve always worked for small companies (now I’m looking for a job at a big company for a change!), where I did the old-school full-stack-developer thing of designing, coding, testing, documenting, deploying, and supporting the applications I worked on. Sometimes I would do a kind of documentation-driven development, where I would design the UI for a screen, then write the documentation for how it would work, then code it that to work that way, with every part of the process informing and helping to drive decisions about the other parts.
So for the past couple days here I’ve been enjoying writing and posting Kitty Todo help/documentation — it’s fun to talk directly to people about your software, and to make yet another thing that is helpful and looks nice.
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