tip of the day?

[Drew Adams]

A thread on help-emacs-windows gave me this idea. I don't know if it's
already been implemented in some way in the past. (Perhaps I need a tip of
the day, to let me know that tip-of-the-day exists!)

Why not exploit the yow/cookie mechanism or something similar to provide a
tip-of-the-day that Emacs users can turn on? Or, just bring up the Emacs
manual at some node as a tip of the day.

In the latter case, the node could be chosen from a selected list of
introductory nodes, perhaps organized by category (e.g. novice vs advanced,
or by subject area), so that some planning went into deciding what to
present, or it could just be chosen at random. Users might even configure
whether they want a random high-level node or to follow the plan.

Years ago, I used yow or cookie (I don't remember) to pop up a random haiku
from a huge file of haikus. That's what made me think this might be one way
to provide a tip of the day. But it would be much easier (no file to
create), and probably better for the user (because s?he can explore from
there), to pop up a manual node.

Some applications use such a tip-of-the-day feature, turning it on by
default, so that new users see a tip at each application startup. Usually,
when the tip pops up, it has a check box that you can uncheck to turn it off
so you never see it again.

Depending on what you are trying to do, what the application is, and how
good the tips are, this feature can be annoying or surprisingly useful.
Because the Emacs manual is so good and so rich, I think this would be
useful for Emacs. But we would need to provide an easy way to turn it off,
because it will surely annoy some of the people some of the time.