Re: What should the user see? (Was: ANNOUNCE : HelpViewer 0.1)

[Jonathan Gapen]

On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> I never used OPENSTEP ... I used NeXTstep.  As far as I can tell, the
> last versions of NeXTstep for sure, and probably early versions of
> OPENSTEP were much closer to the OpenStep idea than later versions of
> OPENSTEP or MacOS-X.  I think tooltips must have been added in a late
> version of OPENSTEP, as I never saw them in NeXTstep and I don't think
> they are in the OpenStep API.

     Yes, OPENSTEP for Mach 4.2 is sort of an odd beast.  It has all sorts
of changes for "cross-platform" use, but mostly for Windows.  I just
noticed that its context-help boxes look identical to those on Windows
2000, including shadow.  And yet it's still undeniably NeXTSTEP.

> I have nothing particular against tooltips, but I do very much dislike
> the replacement of the very good help panel context sensitive help by
> this tooltip-like help in NSHelpManager.

     Yes, I have yet to see a context-help box on Windows that does
anything but re-state the obvious.  The help for "Show icon in taskbar
when connected" is "Specifies whether an icon is displayed in the status
area when a connection is made."  Gosh, thanks for the clarification.  Now
what's a "status area?"  Even if they contained useful information,
they're a pretty poor substitute for what the help panel provides.

> Fast, context sensitive, searchable, hypertext links, back/forward
> buttons, an index of topics, hidden when the app is inactive.  The only
> thing I'd change really would be to make it support xhtml rather than
> just rtfd.  Perhaps it could invoke an external viewer application to
> follow links to remote systems.

     You've got my vote.
     I'm not completely sold on XHTML, though.  It's not
well-suited for the table of contents or index, and RTF/RTFD has strong
API support in the form of NSAttributedString, NSFileWrapper and NSText
methods.  But XHTML does have two big advantages in XML and URL support.
Guess I wouldn't mind either way.

-- 
 "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we
are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and
servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." ---Theodore
Roosevelt