Re: ANNOUNCE : HelpViewer 0.1

[Martin Brecher]

Using the question mark button on windows brings up only some extended 
tooltips which are useless most time anyway.

Opening the complete help text / chapter and jumping to the matching 
part for the referencing item would be way better. It would help finding 
corresponding hints or the like (i.e. using html links which 
can't/shouldn't be used in a (large) tool tip).
For example: you want help on a specific item in a preferences dialog. 
You open its context help. Getting help for all the items (may they be 
related or not) is just a matter of scrolling or going to the next/prev. 
chapter.

Tool tips should just be what they claim to be: short tips. Like 
"Retrieve mail from mail servers and local mailspool file" for GNUMail's 
Get button. Whereas context help should be explaining more and link you 
to the help on setting up the mail sources, what SMTP/IMAP/POP are, etc.

Greetings,
Martin

Andreas Heppel wrote:
> In Windoze you have this litle question mark in the title bar (at least 
> it used to be there when I last used it a long time ago :)In my 
> understanding this has the same meaning as this ominous 'Help key'.
> This also the way I understand the OpenStep API. In NSHelpManager you have
> - (void) setContextHelp: (NSAttributedString *) help withObject: (id) 
> object
> used to assign one little piece of text to anUI element (or even an 
> otherobject which wouldn't make much sense, though).
> -> Kind of enhanced tooltips.
> I doubt that this is used much and would prefer one centralized viewer 
> (either HelpViwer or some internal GNUstep tool) bringing me to the 
> requested bit of information. This  also had the advantage that from 
> here I could follow a link to a different topic or open another help 
> file which I can't with the current implementation of contect help (or 
> the way I interpret its API).
>
> Cheers,
> Andreas