Mentor

Other products by Chilliware

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005A9W1
• Item model number: 0970678703
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 26, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #35,189 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

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

Amazon.com Product Description

Mentor is a documentation wizard for Linux developers that lets you easily create, organize, and compress your help files and advanced tooltips, and intuitively edit the content of your documentation (edit in HTML or text view). Not only is Mentor easy to use, the help files it creates are also easy to use, as well as stylish and consistent.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Orphanware!, April 29, 2002

By A Customer

This is a product from a company that no longer exists. The lack of a parent company means:
1. you cannot register your purchase
2. you cannot get "the latest version" as you are told to do by every writable surface within this box
3. there is no "24/7" support
4. you are better off tossing your money down a rat hole