Re: Contextual Help
Re: Contextual Help
- Subject: Re: Contextual Help
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 09 Aug 2003 08:46:50 -0400
on 03-08-09 7:08 AM, Stefan Sch|_ler at email@hidden wrote:
>
I'm looking for examples of contextual help in NextStep/OpenStep based
>
systems using the NSHelpManager. Any link to example code or
>
screenshots would be great.
>
>
Is there a guideline describing how contextual help should look like in
>
terms of style and content? I could not find anything in Apple's
>
guidelines.
Recipe 20 of my book "Cocoa Recipes for Mac OS X - The Vermont Recipes
(Peachpit) contains sample code for using NSHelpManager in a Cocoa app.
Apple removed all the PB and IB support for NSHelpManager several versions
ago (Mac OS X 10.0?) because they were undecided about whether Cocoa
Tooltips was all the context help we need. But NSHelpManager is still there
for backward compatibility, and it works if you do it programmatically.
I think this is important, because if you don't implement it, your Cocoa app
will still automatically put up a question mark cursor whenever the user
hits the help key -- but nothing happens when you click on an object in your
app if you haven't implemented NSHelpManager. If you do implement
NSHelpManager, you get a sort of tooltip-on-steroids when you click on
something using the question mark cursor.
Carbon has its own form of "expanded" tooltips, which haven't shown up in
Cocoa yet. NSHelpManager is a reasonable substitute, because it allows you
to embed graphics and styles in a much larger tooltip, as well as
implementing the question mark cursor. I think of NSHelpManager-based
tooltips as an intermediate level of user help for your application. The
hierarchy is tooltips - context help - Apple Help Viewer-based HTML help.
--
Bill Cheeseman - email@hidden
Quechee Software, Quechee, Vermont, USA
http://www.quecheesoftware.com
The AppleScript Sourcebook -
http://www.AppleScriptSourcebook.com
Vermont Recipes -
http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/VermontRecipes
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