| Mentor sallies forth with a noble idea--provide a central utility for assembling scattered help and documentation files into a coherent help system for a piece of software--but fails to provide enough value to keep developers away from proven ways of doing this work. When it comes down to it, Mentor is little more than a file-management utility that generates index files. It's awkward to learn and use. Installation of Mentor went well--which is good, because we weren't able to get through to the Chilliware support site. The product runs under all Linux distributions that are based on the 2.2.x kernel. We installed under Red Hat Linux 7.1 and had no compatibility problems. As is the case with integrated development environments (IDEs) for software itself, the work you do in Mentor is grouped into projects. You create a new project and use a three-paned window to manage what it contains. Essentially, you have one file tree on the left, containing all the files Mentor can see locally and on the network. You have a second file tree in the middle pane, representing the files you've copied from the general file system into the current project. The rightmost pane is a fairly crude text editor with which you can modify the text and HTML files you've added to the project. You might expect such a specialized program to perform its duties with a clever interface, optimized for the job. No such luck with Mentor. Even the process of file management is clunky. You can't drag and drop files: neither from the general file system into the project nor among folders in the project. Getting files to go into specific project folders is a tedious, multistep task. To get a file out of one project folder and into another, you apparently have to remove the file from the project completely, then re-add it to the folder you want. Mentor's user interface is a pain in small software projects; it's not at all suitable for big documentation jobs. The process of generating index files isn't all that automated either. Users spend a lot of time in Mentor's text editor, inserting headers and tagging keywords. This process is painful. And, irony of ironies, the user help system for Mentor is pretty bad. You'll spend a lot of time trying to figure out the program's conventions and techniques on your own. Though the results can be of good quality, help systems of equivalent quality can be built with a plain HTML or text editor in combination with a general-purpose file manager.--David Wall |
