Re: Need Help with Help
Re: Need Help with Help
- Subject: Re: Need Help with Help
- From: Jessica Kahn <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 10:19:26 -0700
Hi,
Glad you found the WWDC session at least a little helpful.
Regarding whether or not your .help bundle will break -- the fact that
it's not supported, but that as you note, it works in some cases, means
that we cannot support you if it does break, and make no claims about
how broken or not this feature is. If you choose to take the risk of
doing something that's not supported, you won't be the first, but it
just means that it's your risk to take.
Furthermore, there are three things to consider if you choose the .help
bundle route:
1) You won't get the per-user Help feature if you install your .help
bundle into /Library/Documentation/Help/, as I assume you plan to.
Everybody who runs Help Viewer on that system will see that Help
content, even if they don't have access/privileges to run your
application.
2) You risk orphaning your help content if the user wants to uninstall
your application.
3) If you install your .help bundle into /Library/Documentation/Help,
you break the rules of being able to drag-install. You're going to need
an installer that can authenticate to obtain admin privileges to write
files into /Library/Documentation/Help.
--Jessica
On Thursday, August 2, 2001, at 05:37 PM, Frangois Frisch wrote:
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.
Thank you for all the work.
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.
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.
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.).
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
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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