It can be done without iframes, but do it however it’s quicker/easier for you, so you don’t waste time with the technical stuff. The rest will be my job, so don’t worry at all. As long as you come up with something good to help the new users, that’s great.
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There’s a lot of discussion on the technical details, but is everyone totally happy with the contents? Perfect with the first shot?
I thought the Quick Tour was supposed to give a very short welcome to new users, showing them the more obscure features and idiosyncracies of Haiku. I think the current version goes too deep and at times addresses not the target audience - new Haiku users coming from another OS - but people that haven’t used another OS before.
An example is slide 17 on the Trash, which is a common metaphor on all desktop OS.
Starting with slide 1 on the Deskbar, why not show the open Deskbar instead of the its preferences and explain that the bottom menu items lead to Applications, Demos, Desktop applets and Preferences. Then the extra slides 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 on those topics could be dropped. After all, it’s pretty obvious what awaits in “Mouse” under Preferences.
The text is often too elaborate and low on information. Take the 1st paragraph, as an example:
What’s a deskbar?
When you first start Haiku, you’ll see the desktop, (like what you’re already
familiar with.) What you’re probably new to is a gray box in the top right corner.
That’s the Deskbar.
Why “a deskbar”? There is only one. It’s a name so it should be capitalized. The topic as question doesn’t make too much sense anyway. A new user may wonder what that “gray box” is, but wouldn’t know that it’s called Deskbar.
I find the first sentence reads very strangely. “(like what you’re already familiar with.)”… is that a colloquialism? Why that first paragraph at all? Would a simple:
“By default at the top right corner of the desktop, the Deskbar is the hub of interacting with Haiku. You can start applications, applet and preferences from there, for example, and switch between running applications.”
Then show the opened Deskbar with an arrow to the running applications list say “List of running applications”. The rest of the items are pretty self explanatory. Maybe another arrow to the Tray saying “Right-click icons for context menus”.
This post is getting very long already and there are many things I could add. For example rhetorical questions (“New to all this?” - of course, I’m a new user) and inconsistant formatting (the ALT key being bold, the CTRL key isn’t). Why show People, DeskCalc and StyledEdit in slide 5?
Again, the Quick Tour doesn’t seem like a Quick Start for new users, but advertising material - which isn’t a bad idea generally either, but not what I imagined the Quick Tour should be.
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We should host this in a git repo and then we can create issues and iterate on it and improve.
I fear things will become unmanageable if we try to do it in a single forum thread.
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That was my hope. Hopefully, you guys can vastly improve it and make it better.
(I’m still debating whether me redoing the demo something I should do or not, but it might give you guys a better quality base for everyone to share and work with, rather than the rough junk demo I uploaded. But that’s up to you guys; if this one is sufficient to begin work with as a team, cool.)
All valid points, but this wasn’t meant to be a 1.0 product. It’s a demo that was rapidly built to show the idea of what I wanted to do, because no one else wanted to try it. It’s 0.0.1 at best, full of mistakes.
Any rewrite would rely less on text and more on animation to convey ideas – even if it was stop motion/slides showing it. For example, I have a salvo of screenshots showing the Deskbar being put in different positions – something not possible in the old demo. This would make things a lot clearer to the user.
And all your points are right; think of the text more as a filler than being finalized. And the points are jumbled up. I think a good cue is actually (yes, I’m actually saying it) is the XP tour, which has a ‘Windows XP Basics’ section. Even as a Mac fan, it’s the best I’ve seen. Seriously. Consistent, with nice music, a female narrator, and automatic playback. Not even the Leopard/Switch to Mac tour is as relaxing as this one.
As for the Trash, I do feel that needs covered, but toned down to not be a main point.
Hope this answers everyone’s questions. Feel free to reply guys, and I’ll do what I can on my end. 
If it’s okay, I think I’ll work on finishing the second version of the demo and see what everyone thinks. Hopefully it’ll be a lot better made than the first one.
I like your demo because it has its own kind of charm… well done…
and easy to follow… short and people like to try out what you explained to them ( I hope I am not wrong)…
layout and format … someone else can do better for sure… sorry not me!
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it is a great idea!
As I got the feeling you may get distracted before continue working on the tour, what with the new distro etc., I started an alternative Quick Tour at https://github.com/humdingerb/quicktour.git
Currently there’s only a “Concept.txt” file with the text for every slide. I’m now creating simple html pages for the slides and will then start to capture the needed screenshots. If anyone has ideas or contributions, please use the issue tracker or pull-requests at the github.
Maybe give me a bit more time to finish the html scaffold… 
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We can work together at BeGeistert this year.
And again, i am not happy with github. I does not know how to add a ‘pull-request’. I am logged in and i can view the Pull requests but there is no visible way to add my own 
iirc (still havent done a PR in public, git noob here), you need to fork the repository into your account, create a commit with the changes into your cloned/forked repo, and then you should be able to do a pull-request to the parent repository.
(Soo to change a line you have to do all that).
Then it’s high time to re-read my blog Contributing via pull requests.
I’ve pushed my html slides to the project. I expect to have the images finished within the week, but we can of course further improve the tour at BeGeistert. And create pull-requests…
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Ha, almost matched the process 
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13b Replicants… no other os has this cool and neat feature
Too many slides…
It’s a seriously tough decision what to leave out…
I’m now at 15 slides + 1 intro slide and 1 contents page. I guess I could add Replicants as well - after all, it’s just one more slide…
OTOH, Replicants are probably not the most important thing to know about at first. I don’t know… I appreciate others opinions on that.
Speaking of feedback: My first draft of the complete Quick Tour is ready for inspection: as zip to download (discouraged because I keep polishing and changing stuff so it’s already slightly outdated…) or just clicking through online.
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Wow, good work
I would remove the slide about Team Monitor (users shouldn’t need it, hopefully) and rather mention the Vulcan Death Grip.
Also I would link to the welcome page, rather than start with the “contents” which looks a bit boring.
On the style, rather than using “>>>” to make clickable things visible, I would add a colored rectangle around them (as for Discuss buttons) and use an unicode arrow if available.
So what are the chances to use JavaScript in the new tour? The content would load faster, which makes for a better user experience.
Which uses more ram which could make for a worse experience. The files are already on the local disk so preloading is of little value.
If it is possible then avoid JS altogether IMO… that way the quick tour world work in Netsurf also on older machines which also happen to be a bit more common among the hardware people are willing to test Haiku on.
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