Re: ANNOUNCE : HelpViewer 0.1

[Andreas Heppel]

Before I answer let me state that I neither know NeXT/OpenStep nor any 
flavour of MacOS. Thus, It may well be that we talk different things here.

On 2003-01-22 14:14:03 +0100 Richard Frith-Macdonald 
<richard@brainstorm.co.uk> wrote:

> On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 10:57  am, Andreas Heppel wrote:
> > - There is something we call tooltips, which is a very short description 
> > of a control. This pops up automatically some time after the mouse cursor 
> > starts to hover over an UI element and goes away automatically, too.
>
> This is clearly what NSHelpManager in MacOS-X is supposed to do ... with 
> the exception that you actually have to hold the 'help' key and click on an 
> item rather than just move the mouse over it.
> I don't think there is an equivalent in OpenStep/NeXTstep as the action of 
> help-clicking an item was supposed to give you context sensitive help there 
> (which is presumably why NSHelpManager documentation talks about context 
> sensitive help when it really means tooltips).
What about some methods in NSView and NSToolTipOwner? I have the AppKit 
Reference by Apple in front of me telling me about
- (NSToolTipTag)addToolTipRext:owner:userData  (in NSView)
and
- (NSString *)view:stringForToolTip:point:userData  (in NSToolTipOwner).
Both being used for tooltips as I described them. Are they an Apple 
extension or what?

<snip>

> In an ideal world I'd provide a range of help capabilities like this ...
>
> 1. tooltips ... use NSHelpManager but change it so that the tooltip is 
> displayed when the mouse passes over an item rather than when it's clicked.
> 2. context help ... use NSHelpPanel as it was intended (but perhaps it 
> should support xhtml help rather than rtf help)
> 3. main app help from the menu ... perhaps ask a helpviewer app to open the 
> apps help file, if no helpviewer is available, use NSHelpPanel
Sounds like what I would like to have. Concerning the tooltip behaviour we 
probably don't need NSHelpManager (see remark about NSView above).

> I'd put the main part of the help display code in NSHelpPanel, and have the 
> helpviewer app add the capability to show/search help from
> multiple applications.
If there are capabilities in NSHelpPanel to link different topics of the 
same app and more or less seamlessly jump to HelpViewer for more advanced 
functions, why not? I only would want to avoid being bound to the displayed 
topic even when in 'context help mode'.

> Using NSHelpPanel has the advantage that the state of your help panel is 
> retained on a per-app basis, so you can switch between looking at the help 
> in different apps very easily/quickly.  Getting the same usability with a 
> single helpviewer app depends on defining an extra DO API for the apps to 
> tell the helpviewer what to do ... it can be done but seems like a lot of 
> effort for no real gain.
You mean one NSHelpPanel instance per application? Or just displaying a new 
help text when the user requests another app's help?

Cheers,
Andreas
--
Andreas Heppel

Mail: aheppel at web dot de
Home: http://www.andreasheppel.de

Check out GSburn.app - the CD burning frontend for GNUstep
http://gsburn.sourceforge.net