Most apps have a Help page. Mine follows you around and punches holes in the screen.
I got tired of building features nobody could find. So two evenings ago, after a Żabka shift, I built Live Guide — an interactive spotlight tour that walks new users through the dashboard step by step.
How it works
A fully transparent top-level window dims the entire app with a dark overlay. Then, using pure tkinter Canvas and the -transparentcolor trick on Windows (one specific colour becomes truly invisible to the OS), I cut a clean glowing hole exactly around the widget I want to highlight.
Three focused steps right now:
- the live chart and time filters
- left & right navigation panels
- hardware cards and session averages
Every "Next" moves the hole and updates the explanation. ESC or a click outside closes it instantly. It's the first time PC Workman feels like it actually wants you to understand it. This is the kind of obsessive detail that turns "another system monitor" into something people actually want to open. Still needs some text-contrast tweaks — but the core is there.
Also this week: I published Part 2 of my offline-AI tutorial — "How I Taught My Offline AI to Remember, Watch, and Warn, Without Any Cloud." Persistent memory, proactive monitoring, and 854 lines of bilingual vocabulary. Full code included.
What's the first thing you'd want highlighted if you opened PC Workman for the first time?