The program tour

A walk through every area of Ganter Lab that opens each page and points at its real controls: where it starts, who is offered it, what the balloon offers, what it never does, and its stops in order.

Take the tour starts a walk through every area of Ganter Lab in the order a station is built: from Welcome through Connector, Logic, Process and View, then the rest of the menu. At each stop the tour opens the page itself and stands a balloon beside the control the stop explains, with a ring around that control. Where the picture needs data on the screen, the balloon also plays a short clip of the real program. The tour only opens pages and points at them: it creates, edits and presses nothing, so it can be taken on a station in production.

Where it starts

Starting from the help panel closes the panel first, so the balloon has the window to itself. The help panel itself is described under The window.

Who is offered it

The tour is offered to the identities the Welcome page is for (see Welcome), with one difference: it does not wait on the station keeping that page, because the help panel offers it on every page.

A stop whose page the role in force may not open is left out of that role's walk, so the count on the balloon is the count of what that role will see. On the published demonstration a stop that plays a clip is the exception: it is shown in the middle of the page the visitor is on, and its own page is not opened. Each screen walks its own tour: a tour taken in the station's own window never moves a browser on the network, and the other way round. When somebody signs in or out on that screen during the tour, the walk keeps the stops the new identity may see, and it ends if the stop on screen is not one of them.

The balloon

While the focus is in the balloon, Escape closes the tour, the left arrow goes back and the right arrow goes on; the right arrow never ends the tour, only Finish does. When the tour ends, the focus goes back to where it was before the tour started, or to the Help key. Going to another page while the tour is open (from the menu, a link or the browser's Back) ends the tour; moving inside the page the stop stands on, such as opening another screen on View, does not.

The balloon stands on the side of the control with the most room, never over the control when a side fits, and always inside the window. It follows the page as it scrolls and the window as it is resized, and it brings a control that is out of view into view. A control the page does not draw right now (a command the role in force does not hold, an empty list, a page still loading) leaves the balloon in the middle of the window with the same words, and the balloon moves to the control if the control appears.

What it never does

The clips are recorded from the program in English and show it in English, whatever the language of the interface; the words of the balloon beside them are always in the language of the interface.

The stops

The whole walk, in order. On the published demonstration it has 21 stops: stops 16, 18, 23 and 24 are left out, and stops 19 to 21 play their clip over the page the visitor is on.