A new take on tutorials
We’ve been making changes to how we present our tutorials for our software tools.
First Steps
Our first tutorials were downloaded with evaluation versions of our tools. When the tool started for the first the tutorial would be shown.
Full versions of the tools did not come with tutorials as we felt this was wasted bandwidth and wasted time downloading material that rarely changed. The tutorial could be downloaded from the website when needed and installed alongside the software.
Second attempt
We recently decided it would be better to host the tutorials on our website. This would allow the tutorial content to be updated at will and thus always provide a better tutorial experience than downloading. This would also make the downloads smaller and thus faster to download.
In addition to this change we have started to introduce video versions of the tutorials. We hope you like it. At present these video tutorials are for C++ Memory Validator. We intend to cover all tutorials for all our software tools.
Creating the videos is interesting – some new tutorial videos have been created as a direct result of creating videos to accompany existing tutorials.
The present
Our latest change is to change how the tutorials are shown to the user of the software tool.
The change is that each software tool now has a dedicated tutorial tab. The tab lists the tutorials that are available, with a title, text indicating if the tutorial is text and/or video and the expertise level required for the tutorial. Double clicking on any tutorial topic takes you directly to the correct tutorial on our website.
Each time an evaluation version of a tool is used (and the first time a purchased software tool is used) the tutorial tab is displayed. The tutorial tab can be closed if desired. If the tutorial is later needed it is available from the help menu.
We hope these changes will make the tutorials more appealing and more accessible than our previous attempts to inform and educate about effective ways to use our software tools.