We are in the process of adding a "Tip Of The Day" window that will appear when LimeWire is started. I know there is a lot of knowledge floating around in people's heads about LimeWire. If you could use this thread to post byte-sized tips, we'll review them all and incorporate some into the tips that are displayed. (Post them all in English -- we'll worry about internationalizing them later.)

Tips like:

"Curious why the search button doesn't work? LimeWire might not be connected to the Gnutella network! Try clicking 'File -> Connect' and waiting till the light in the bottom left becomes green before searching."

"You can turn tooltips off or on in most tables by right-clicking on the column headers and choosing 'More Options'. You can toggle other options here too, like whether or not to sort tables automatically and if you want the rows to be striped."

"When you see the download in 'Needs More Sources', try clicking on that download and then clicking 'Find More Sources' -- LimeWire will search the network for more places to download the file."

"Tired of downloads stopping halfway through? It helps to pick search results that have a higher number in the '#' column. The # is the amount of unique places on the network that are hosting the file. The more sources, the better the chance of getting a download!"

etc....

Thanks!!

Interesting idea. Mac OS 9 had a contextual help balloon system, rather like your tooltips, that could be turned off (or else it was almost as irritating as that damned MS Office animated computer).

Are you thinking to add an option or link to the LW website to "view all tips?"

How do you want to handle any OS specific tips, Sam?

and my favourite--how about a link to a diagnostic tool for connections!

Many Windows programs contain an extra dialog that appears when the program is started called "Tip Of The Day". This dialog gives various usage tips that aren't easily categorized for a help file and are more useful as random tidbits of advice.

There of course is an option to not display the TOTD (Tip of the Day) dialog and to redisplay later if needed.

The less OS specific, the better... however, we might be persuaded to add support for OS specific tips if there's enough need for them.

The balloon help is, as you said, contextual. TOTD's are not contextual -- they're just random information. After the TOTD is complete we're planning to look into adding contextual help (much like, but less annoying than, the MS Clippy guy) -- but because that project is a little larger, we're doing this one first.

It'd look something like this:

Ah. Makes sense.

"Curious why the search button doesn't work? LimeWire might not be connected to the Gnutella network! Try clicking 'File -> Connect' and waiting till the light in the bottom left becomes green before searching."

append--?

"You can also see the connections in 'View ->Show/Hide -> Connections'"

"Low on Memory? LimeWire needs less memory if you hide options in the View Menu. When you want those Views, you can always turn them back on"

Will the Website designer (Aubrey?) edit all these for style and tone? They so easily sound patronizing, and whoever writes the web site does a pretty good job of style.

Just so long as you can turn the tips off, and they stay off in preferences, I don't care if you give tips on plugging the computer in or proper condom use . . .

I have a suggestion for a tip, even though I don’t know the answer!

On the search tab, on the bottom there are six different search options

Any type, programs, documents, audio, video, and images.

What file types will each option search for? If I select documents/programs will it find zip files or not? A tip of the day to explain this would be helpful.

Also, it would be nice if there were a way to edit the list of file extensions each option searched for too, or at least a “No Media Files” and “Media Files” option was added. (Media files being Audio, Image, and Video combined…)


***RANT ALERT***
While I’m on the topic of file types does anyone mind if I rant for a little bit? (I apologize to anyone I might offend in advance!)

Why does Limewire by default limit what file types you share? The files I most often search for end in “fig”, “sfc”, “smc”, “gb”, “gbc”, and “gba”. None of which Limewire shares by default… It’s not like you can predict every type of file someone might want to put on the network so why pretend? If you know certain files are bad and people would not want to share them then make a “Do not share files with these extensions” option instead.

Don’t get me wrong on the rant; Limewire is the best P2P software out there.

Cheers,
Jonathan

i
It would be nice if Limewire remembered the searches between quitting and opening again

I just hid some tabs via the View menu, but memory use hasn't gone down, according to Win2k's Task Manager. Pressing the x button doesn't lower memory use either.

"A shared folder also shares the folders nested within it" - at least I think this is true, is it?

It wasn't at all obvious when I started using LW, and the suggestion of adding additional folders implies that each must be selected.