I finished Tuesday’s sessions at the Apple Help table. One of the Apple tech writers walked me through some of the more recent changes to Help. One of these is an Exact Match query. This allows you to create an alias table for search terms. Synonyms, acronyms, etc. can be built into the compiled index file. The table is built using a plist. Each alias resolves to an anchor, then Help Viewer shows all pages with that anchor. This feature is currently available in Leopard, but may not have been made public through the reference documentation. It is fully documented for Snow Leopard.
The other change is how content set up in your project file for translation/localization. Previously you had to provide all of your project files for every build of every application. So, a build for one language would require including all of the files for other languages. Now you can have a folder for shared content and separate folders for the variant content for each build language. Apple calls these “type 3″ help books. They also offer some performance improvements because book config info is in a plist file, instead of embedded in the HTML. The type 3 help books are not backwards compatible from Snow Leopard.
An additional important change is that help books that use the remote content features, such as “internet primary,” will have javascript disabled unless the remote server is accessed over https. (note the ’s’). This also applies to Support site search results, those pages should be served over https or JS will be turned off. This is a new adjustment with Snow Leopard and doesn’t apply to Leopard or earlier.
The revised Apple Help Guide is due to be released in September along with Snow Leopard.
I also had a chance to look at the Help info being developed for the iPhone user guide. You can currently find a version in Safari that links to the online content. One of the features of iPhone 3.0 allows web-based content to be cached for offline use. This would be very useful for UA purposes. For example, if a user is in Airplane mode or without wi-fi/3G service.
I stopped in at the iPhone Web Applications Lab to get some questions answered about integrating UIWebView with a Tool bar and also about the rendering of the Viewport sizing for web content. The guy I talked to looked like he was about 12 but he was able to answer my questions.
The evening festivities included the Apple Design Awards. At least a couple thousand people attended. It was a slick event celebrating some of the best designed apps for Mac and iPhone.
That was followed by Stump the Experts. This was a really fun gathering of developers competing against a stage full of experts with trivia questions related to Apple. It sounds boring as hell. But there must have been at least fifteen hundred people there. The hosts, the experts, the audience, and the questions were really entertaining. Somehow they were able to make light work of questions like: Which CFDictionary APIs changed in a non-backwards-compatible way between 10.0 and 10.5. It was fun, I’m serious!
Wednesday morning I took in a session specifically about UIWebView. This is an area that is key to the things I am doing with iPhone Help. UIWebView provides an easy to use control for displaying web-based content in an iPhone app. The WebView is easily integrated with the parent views and various iPhone controls. The effect is that the user is working within the app environment, but web-based content can be pulled in anywhere and be fully integrated. This makes it easy to integrate web-based Help content.
I finished up the conference at the Developer Documentation Lab. One of the documentation managers gave me a tour of the various offerings.
While there was still two and a half more days of iPhone conference left, I needed to move on to the Usability Professionals Association conference in Portland.
Tags: Apple, technical-writing, user assistance
