[OT] Instructional design and the demise of AppleGuide

[Stephen Barncard]

Well along with that thread --

[observations of HELP in the IDE]

there now seems to be some aspects of the "HELP" menu in OSX that are 
there whether we want it or not.  Like the 'Search' Menu that appears 
there  while in any application using Leopard.

When I type some common terms in that search menu like "Edit" or 
"Help", I get a few 'hits' but they don't relate to anything I have 
been using recently -- just help pages from the long-gone but 
sometimes still useful "Audion".

Nicely formatted pages and they come up quickly. What is that? It's 
not the 'help viewer' - it's built-in. Fast, too. How do we tap into 
that?

[postscript after trying search in an standalone]

Wow! Cool Leopard feature. If you type a single char in the 
help:search box, it reveals a list of menu items that begin with that 
character, then actually POINTS THEM OUT with the revealed menu and a 
big blue arrow. This would be a great boon to applications that have 
a lot of menu items. This is might be a good reason to include the 
HELP menu in all MacOS apps even though the app may not have any 
local help items.


sqb

>I'm redesigning the Help system for a couple of the apps we develop, 
>and  I'm attracted to some of the ideas of AppleGuide, esp. having 
>tutorial info directly within the software itself so users can more 
>easily perform the steps without switching back and forth between 
>applications.
>
>But Apple dropped AppleGuide long ago, and usually when I to think 
>Apple does something for arbitrary reasons I find out later there 
>was a sound rationale behind the decision.
>
>
>TIA -
>
>--
>  Richard Gaskin

-- 


stephen barncard
s a n  f r a n c i s c o
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