Keeping up the franctic pace of nearly weekly releases, Robin Lu has once again updated iChm to include another user-requested feature. Version 1.3 now allows you to search the index — this great little app just keeps getting better!
Archive for the 'Online Help' Category
Shortly after the well-received release of iChm 1.1.1, Robin Lu has responded to popular demand and updated his CHM Reader for Mac OS X with support for indexes.
The sidebar now includes a small popup menu (shown at left) which toggles the sidebar to display either the table of contents or the index.
Congratulations to Robin for listening to users and reacting so quickly!
With the new index feature, Sparkle-based application updates and the tag-powered bookmarking system mentioned earlier, iChm is certainly the best CHM viewer available for Mac.
Robin Lu has released iChm, a Cocoa-based CHM Reader for Mac OS X with Webkit rendering, a slick tabbed interface and a bookmark system that not only allows you to store links to favorite topics in the current file, but also keeps track of your bookmarks across multiple files like in a regular Web browser.
When you bookmark a topic, you can assign tags which allow you to quickly access topics in any CHM file based on the keywords you have specified.
While the concept of tagging is hardly new, the feature is unique to CHM viewers on the Mac, and can be especially useful for help developers looking for a simple means of flagging open issues in topics—just add a FIXME tag to keep track of those pesky output bugs while you tweak your WebWorks stationery.
Unfortunately, iChm shares a shortcoming with many other Mac CHM viewers: the current version (1.1.1) offers no support for the index, which is an essential component of any well-built help system. With a little luck and a bit of persuasion, perhaps Robin can be convinced to add this feature in a later version.
It wouldn’t take much to make this the best CHM viewer available on the Mac—so many of the others were apparently released as one-hit wonders and have not been actively maintained in years.
2008-08-27 Update: Version 1.2 now includes index support.
2008-09-04 Update: Version 1.3 now allows you to search the index.
Adobe’s Senior Product Evangelist RJ Jacquez has posted an online training session on the new RoboHelp Packager for AIR, a new Adobe Labs download that allows you to roll a RoboHelp project into a standalone app that runs on the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) platform.
AIR is beginning to look like an interesting cross-platform option for online help and performance support systems, since you can include typical navigation aids (such as table of contents, index, search, glossary, favorites, etc.), provide auto-updates and even roll in existing PDF content into a standalone package that will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.
The AIR runtime is a free download that includes a WebKit browser and Adobe Flash engine to enable desktop use of Internet applications–even offline. So while the technology is fairly new, it may prove very useful in the development of cross-platform help solutions.
Like so many other applications, Microsoft’s HTML Help Workshop often chokes on project files whose paths contain spaces.
If you double-click a HTML Help Project File (HHP) in a location whose path contains spaces, the HTML Help Workshop throws an error when you click the Compile button and refuses to compile the CHM file.
Cannot open the file ""C:\Folder Name\File Name.hhp"".
You can work around this issue by removing the quotes from the path shown in the Create a compiled file dialog before you click the Compile button, but you still won’t be able to save any changes you’ve made to the HHP file.
SOLUTION: Instead of double-clicking, open the HHP file from within the Help Workshop via File > Open. This helps the Workshop to handle the paths properly and you will be able to save your changes and compile as expected.
A quick search for Mac CHM viewers yields a handful of open source & shareware apps which provide Mac users access to Windows help files in the Compiled HTML Help (CHM) format.
A few older shareware apps such as Chimp and CHM Viewer are only available in PowerPC versions and apparently no longer actively developed.
The remaining candidates are all free, open source software and available as universal binaries for PPC & Intel Macs. Each does pretty much the same thing–more or less successfully–though none of them quite manage to support all of the features CHMs provide in their native Windows environment.
Here’s a short list of a few pros (+) & cons (-) that appear at first glance:
Chmox
+ Beautiful HTML page rendering via Apple’s WebKit browser engine
- Chokes on some large & complex pages
- No search, index or favorites supportxCHM
+ Functional search, index & favorites (bookmarks)
- Only basic HTML rendering, poor table/CSS supportChamonix
+ Supposedly supports ToC, Indexing, Search and Favorites,
- Unreliable–index shown in test file is incomplete, odd CSS background rendering quirks
(should we read “Chamonix” as “shame on it”?)
For a more detailed–though somewhat outdated–comparison of xCHM & the now-defunct CHM Viewer, see this Mac OS X Hints article.
Today Adobe announced the release of the new Technical Communication Suite, a bundle that includes the following programs:
- FrameMaker 8
- RoboHelp 7
- Captivate 3
- Acrobat 3D Version 8
The press release touts a “major upgrade to RoboHelp”, but apart from that, it remains to be seen how useful the new bundling scheme will prove as many of those with a need for software like this certainly already own one or more of the tools in the package.
One issue that is frequently encountered in online Help development is a Microsoft security “fix” that prevents display of content in CHM files opened from a network. Typically, the CHM file itself is opened and the table of contents is visible, but the content pane on the right remains empty.
On corporate networks, users can often get around this issue by copying the CHM to a local disk instead of opening from a network drive. When linking to CHMs on an intranet:
If your intranet Web page uses the HTTP URL scheme to link to .chm files, security update 896358 may prevent users from seeing topics in the .chm file. Replacing an HTTP file path with a UNC file path can make it possible again to open .chm files from the Web page.
For more information, see the Microsoft support knowledge base article entitled “You cannot open HTML Help files from Internet Explorer after you install security update 896358 or Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1″ at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/902225/.