[edit] Idea

Don't show the tip, when we show the about box after a version upgrade.
Have application (bt-edit,bt-live,...) specific tips
Add a "tip of the day" entry to help menu (this allows to reenable tips at startup if it had been turned off)

[edit] Implementation

We store the tips as an array with messages, that can be translated in the po file. In the settings we remember which tip we have shown already as a list of numbers. when we want to show a tip, we build a list of numbers *not* in the settings, count them and generate a random number to pick one. If the remaining list became empty, we reset.

We only append new tips to the end of the array. If a tip becomes obsolete we set it to NULL (or "") and the implementation will check for that.

The dialog will have:

the tip
a checkbox to enable/disable ("show tips at startup")
a button "okay" (GTK_STOCK_OK)
a button "another tip" (GTK_STOCK_REFRESH or GTK_STOCK_GO_FORWARD)

[edit] Existing Implementations

gimp : tips-dialog.c, tips-dialog.h, tips-parser.c, tips-parser.h

[edit] Tips

[edit] Already committed

"New machines are added in machine view from the context menu."
"Connect machines by holding the shift key and dragging a connection for the source to the target machine."
"Songs can be recoderd as single waves per track to give it to remixers."
"Fill the details on the info page. When recording songs, the metadata is added to the recording as tags."
"Use jackaudio sink in audio device settings to get lower latencies for live machine control."
"You can use input devices such as joysticks, beside midi devices to live control machine parameters."
"You can use a upnp media client (e.g. media streamer on nokia tablets) to remote control buzztard."
"To enter notes, imagine your pc keyboard as a music keyboard in two rows. Bottom left y/z key becomes a 'c', s a 'c#', x a 'd' and so on."
"You can get more help from the community on irc://irc.freenode.net/#buzztard."