Ask HN: Has "Clippy" ever been done right? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has "Clippy" ever been done right?

5 pointstmcneal6 comments

As most of you know, Clippy (a.k.a. Clippit), was an "office assistant" in MS Office that interjected itself into a normal workflow to provide help on the current task. It has been criticized as being intrusive and unhelpful by many users and has since been removed from MS Office.

My question to the HN community: Have you ever encountered software that has implement "Clippy" the right way? In other words, is there software that provides context-specific messaging in the middle of a workflow that is actually beneficial and unobtrusive?

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It's not even close in concept to clippy, but to answer your specific question:

  > is there software that provides context-specific
  > messaging in the middle of a workflow that is 
  > actually beneficial and unobtrusive?

I can think of several:

* Auto-suggestion (google, visual studio)

* Spell-checkers (word procesors, browsers)

* Gmail's tips (the yellow bar on top with the "undo" link that appears every time you delete/archive/send a message)

One thing I'd love to see would be a system that detected when I used the mouse to run a command that had a hotkey shortcut and displayed the shortcut while performing the action. For example, if I used the mouse to click the File menu in notepad and then clicked Save, I want something to tell me "HEY! You're doing it wrong! Try Ctrl-S next time."

Whether this is handled at the OS level or on an application by application basis, the interface would need to be spot on to keep people from deleting the damned thing, but I would love to see this sort of functionality integrated into more of the things I use on a daily basis.

I want one that can say stuff like "your trying to configure virtualhost in apache, but you've buggered it up..." ...and then offer helpful fixes.

Google's spell checker (Did you mean...?) and gmail's file attachment reminders are two which come to mind immediately.

<sarcasm>bonzi buddy!</sarcasm>

No.

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