Re: Need Help with Help
Re: Need Help with Help
- Subject: Re: Need Help with Help
- From: François Frisch <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2001 17:37:30 -0700
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First off, speaking for many of the Apple folks who watch and answer
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questions on lists like this one, we do understand the frustration
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surrounding a lack of documentation, out-dated documentation, or
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erroneous documentation. I do my best to review all Apple Help docs for
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accuracy, but that said, I realize there are errors and gaps. I'm sure
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the same is true for other engineers with responsible for other
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technologies. Have you checked out the latest draft of the canonical
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Apple Help documentation, though? Again, it's located at
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<http://developer.apple.com/macos/help.html>, under the Apple Help
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Documentation link. We've been working on it.
Thank you for all the work.
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Next, on the topic of .help bundles, it's not that we're trying to
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prevent you from using any cool feature, but most developers, especially
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Cocoa developers, won't need to use these bundles, and for those who do
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need them, we'd like to do some additional qualification before claiming
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to support them. The reason most developers don't even need .help
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bundles is because all they do is allow for you to ship multiple
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localizations of a help book. If you have a bundled application, you can
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just stick your standard (non-bundled) help book into your bundled app,
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and you'll have that same level of functionality.
The help is working as a bundle. All the targets are setup etc... So I'd
rather not throw everything away and spend more time doing so. Is it going
to break? There are plenty of .help bundles being used by Apple and others
in various places so I don't understand the problem.
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I'm sorry that you spent time organizing your help content into a .help
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bundle, but, I don't think it should take too long to un-bundle it.
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Generally, whatever is in your English.lproj can just be moved out of
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there, and put into a "My App Help" folder, which is then put into the
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Resources/ area of your application's bundle. Do the same with your
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other localizations, placing them into the appropriate .lrpoj
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directories inside of your application's bundle.
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If you have access to, or plan to get access to, the WWDC 2001 videos,
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check out session #125, which was all about Apple Help. The first half
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or so of the presentation discussed the authoring side of Apple Help,
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and the second half was given by me, and discussed how to access your
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help from your application (including how to successfully set up your
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Info.plist, etc.).
wasn't online when we did our help + takes 45 minutes to get what could be
ten lines of help. Enjoyed watching TV for a bit though (I don't have one).
However there was something which I found no where else and that was that
the Help Indexer is in the CarbonLib SDK... not obvious.
Thanks again
Francois
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Hope this information is helpful.
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--Jessica
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Technical Lead, Apple Help
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On Wednesday, August 1, 2001, at 03:41 PM, Frangois Frisch wrote:
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>> Also wanted to second Dave's assertion that .help bundles aren't really
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>> for public consumption.
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> Can you expand on this? What are the problems with using it?
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> To judge by the state of the documentation Apple recommends not to use
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> any
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> help at all. It's getting tedious to work for days trying to make
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> undocumented things to work only to be told by Apple afterwards that it
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> shouldn't of been done that way after all.
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> Personally I don't want any new features, I don't care how fast my
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> application load or any thing else. I just want to be able to understand
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> what I've got now on my hard drive.
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> Francois
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