MarcEdit 7.6.x: Consolidating help

Over the past 4 months, I’ve been working on the MarcEdit code-base. It’s large, and I’ve been needing to pay down some technical debt — including — making some significant changes to support breaking changes in .NET 6. At this point, the work is done, and a number of new versions will be showing up over the next few weeks/months.

One of the areas where I’ve been giving a lot of thought is how help happens or users get help. MarcEdit’s documentation is spread over a number of places including the blog, the website, a knowledge-base, the listserv, etc. To help to consolidate this information together, I’ve been working on a hub in the app so that I have a place to work on consolidating this information.

The new hub is going to extend the idea of helper agents in MarcEdit — in this case — our new helper…Mabel.

The idea here is to provide new to MarcEdit users and experienced users a place to find/search for information related to the program.

At this point, the way that this will show up in MarcEdit 7.6 is as a new link called — Ask Mabel. It will be found on the Main Window:

When the user selects this link, they will be taken to the following hub:

Here you will find the following sections:

1. This is the search box. It accesses common questions, functions, links to youtube, the listserv and provides a search of the consolidated knowledge-base.
2. Results Page. By default, you get a set of quick links and resources, but query results will show in this page.
3. The sometimes helpful user agent.
4. A way to open results into your browser and outside of the tool.

The quick links page is going to be a local page, so users can customize this page to include links to local resources and help as well.

I’ll provide more information — but I’ve done a quick screenshare (without sound) of how this hub will initially work.

Questions, let me know.

–tr