Re: Need Help with Help
Re: Need Help with Help
- Subject: Re: Need Help with Help
- From: Jessica Kahn <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 19:24:17 -0700
Boy, it's really frustrating that I had an old message that I'd sent to
this list, on exactly this topic, some months ago, and I just trashed it
(and 7000 other messages to this list) today, having overrun my mail
quota. Grr.
Anyway, I'll do my best to reconstruct what I'd said on the topic of
.help bundles.
First off, speaking for many of the Apple folks who watch and answer
questions on lists like this one, we do understand the frustration
surrounding a lack of documentation, out-dated documentation, or
erroneous documentation. I do my best to review all Apple Help docs for
accuracy, but that said, I realize there are errors and gaps. I'm sure
the same is true for other engineers with responsible for other
technologies. Have you checked out the latest draft of the canonical
Apple Help documentation, though? Again, it's located at
<
http://developer.apple.com/macos/help.html>, under the Apple Help
Documentation link. We've been working on it.
Next, on the topic of .help bundles, it's not that we're trying to
prevent you from using any cool feature, but most developers, especially
Cocoa developers, won't need to use these bundles, and for those who do
need them, we'd like to do some additional qualification before claiming
to support them. The reason most developers don't even need .help
bundles is because all they do is allow for you to ship multiple
localizations of a help book. If you have a bundled application, you can
just stick your standard (non-bundled) help book into your bundled app,
and you'll have that same level of functionality.
I'm sorry that you spent time organizing your help content into a .help
bundle, but, I don't think it should take too long to un-bundle it.
Generally, whatever is in your English.lproj can just be moved out of
there, and put into a "My App Help" folder, which is then put into the
Resources/ area of your application's bundle. Do the same with your
other localizations, placing them into the appropriate .lrpoj
directories inside of your application's bundle.
If you have access to, or plan to get access to, the WWDC 2001 videos,
check out session #125, which was all about Apple Help. The first half
or so of the presentation discussed the authoring side of Apple Help,
and the second half was given by me, and discussed how to access your
help from your application (including how to successfully set up your
Info.plist, etc.).
Hope this information is helpful.
--Jessica
Technical Lead, Apple Help
On Wednesday, August 1, 2001, at 03:41 PM, Frangois Frisch wrote:
Also wanted to second Dave's assertion that .help bundles aren't really
for public consumption.
Can you expand on this? What are the problems with using it?
To judge by the state of the documentation Apple recommends not to use
any
help at all. It's getting tedious to work for days trying to make
undocumented things to work only to be told by Apple afterwards that it
shouldn't of been done that way after all.
Personally I don't want any new features, I don't care how fast my
application load or any thing else. I just want to be able to understand
what I've got now on my hard drive.
Francois
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