Re: Contextual Help
Re: Contextual Help
- Subject: Re: Contextual Help
- From: Stefan Schüßler <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2003 15:39:08 +0200
Thanks for the fast reply, maybe I haven't made myself clear enough.
I know how to use NSHelpManager and how to compile my RTF files into
a property list.
What I'm looking for is an example of the RTF-files that are actually
shown when the user help-clicks an interface item. What fonts to use,
what kind of text decorations and so on. Is this totally left to the
developer?
Stefan
Am Samstag, 09.08.03 um 14:46 Uhr schrieb Bill Cheeseman:
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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