Submitted by cicerosc on 2017/10/17 22:34
I am back after many years using Ecco ready to give infoqube another try. Today I went to the YouTube channel and saw the video on "homepage" 
 
I think it is a great idea to use YouTube to give an introduction to the way the program is used. However I was totally unable to grasp the purpose of showing how to use the homepage. 
 
 I understand what a two pane outliner is, and I understand what a single pane outliner is, and I think both of those formats have obvious uses to a lot of people. Everyone seems to understand that infoqube is an information manager, and any variation on the outlining /spreadsheet model is pretty easy to understand. 
 
 But watching the YouTube video, I had no idea what a homepage was, or why I should be interested in a homepage, or what I would do with it if I figured it out. 
 
 Making a YouTube video forces you to conceptualize what it is you're trying to explain.   I would love to see a series of basic YouTube videos showing how infoqube can be used on basic, understandable, tasks, that lots of people  might use on a daily basis. 
 
 I can tell after being away so long that great improvement has been made in IQ, but I would hazard to guess that Gantt charts, surface views, and even the calendar are not functions that most people who are looking at information managers will want to dump their existing program to change to on the spot.  What attracts people is the strength in managing information. I have abandoned the calendar and address book and Gantt charts in Ecco to focus on the core outlining/columns/sorting functions, and I would wager that a lot of your target audience feels the same way about core features.
 
 What info cube seems to do best is to provide a usable GUI front end to a database/spreadsheet manipulation engine.  I would love to see examples of how it is used in that way on YouTube to solve practical tasks..

Comments

Hi cicerosc and welcome back !
 
Comments from newcomers are always welcomed. Videos is definitely something I'd like to work on, but I'm too busy right now...
 
Regarding the homepage, the overall IQ user manual is progressing quite well, so do take a look at it. Specifically, see 8. Home Pages
 
HTH !
 
Pierre_Admin
IQ Designer
 

 Hi Cicerosc!
 
Great question - one of my passions is UI and user experience which applies to just about everything where communicating infomation is involved, so your feedback is helpful.  Watching that video (which I recorded) I can certainly understand how someone not using IQ day to day would be asking "OK, so what the heck is the point of this".  I think part of the confusion is the name "Home Page".  Basically as I'm showing it in that video it's more of a Navigation Bar.  So it's a way to create a completely customizable navigation bar (or many of them), and the items in the navigation bar can do anything from launch grids, to launch external websites.  Make sense?
 
And the "home page" can be always visible in a pane on the side, or it can be hidden to the side and only slide out when you hover your mouse over it.