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Issue 5.3

FEATURE

Simple Help

Simple in-app help for your projects

Issue: 5.3 (March/April 2007)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 44,448
Starting Page Number: 14
Article Number: 5309
Resource File(s):

Download Icon 5309.zip Updated: 2013-03-11 19:07:59

Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

Sad as it may be, every program needs a help system, even if it's just a simple one. Computers are easier to use these days, and if your program is well done, hopefully your users will never even need to use the help system, but you should still provide one: it will save you technical support and it's a good way to communicate with your users.

Now you might think that since today's modern operating systems include their own built-in help systems it'd make the most sense to utilize those. Unfortunately, those systems are often complicated, requiring documentation in specific, unique formats. Even worse, the systems for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux are not compatible with each other, so if you're creating a cross-platform application, you have do a lot more work.

REALbasic does not include a help system (other than "tool tips" type help), but there are third-party applications such as UniHelp that do a fabulous job at creating cross-platform help. These additions, however, do cost money and are more complicated, though they are quite powerful and flexible.

So what about the user who just wants basic cross-platform capable help with a minimum of fuss? A few years ago I decided to create my own simple help system (I use it in software I sell, such as my Z-Write word processor). My primary goal was to keep it simple by incorporating every aspect of the help system into a single element which could be easily added to new projects. More complicated help systems have multiple parts which must be added to your REALbasic project in the proper order to function correctly.

Note that while this article covers the internals of the HelpWindow project in detail, you don't have to know anything about how it's programmed just to use it in your own applications. Just read the "Using HelpWindow" section and the "Setting Up a HelpWindow HTML Document" sidebar for all the information you need to use HelpWindow in your own projects.

On the other hand, if you're curious how it works, read on!

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