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J. Shell, October 20, 2003 11:38 AM, in Apple / Mac | TrackBack

Jon Udell has been writing about interfaces lately. This little bit makes me miss an old Mac OS feature:

In one crucial way, the rich GUI is tragically disadvantaged with respect to its poor browser cousin. Trying to sort out a permissions problem with IIS 6, I clicked a Help button and landed on a Web page. The page could only describe the tree-navigation procedure required to find the tabbed dialog box where I could address the problem. It could not link to that dialog box. This is nuts when you stop and think about it. Documentation of GUI software needs pages of screenshots and text to describe procedures that, on the Web, are encapsulated in links that can be published, bookmarked, and e-mailed. A GUI that doesn't embrace linking can never be truly rich.
["How Rich is the Rich GUI?", Jon Udell, 17 Oct 2003, viewed 20 Oct 2003]
In System 7.5, which was initially billed as the "half step to Copland," Apple introduced Apple Guide as its preferred help system. Apple Guide had many elements of modern HTML based help systems, but it could also control the user interface, and hilight elements to click on. A guide might say "click on the Apple Menu" and circle the Apple Menu in red. It could perform some steps for a user, with a "Do it for me" action, but still showing the steps involved. This could teach the user things like changing their screen resolution, how to change views in the Finder, etc, all by guiding a user through the actions. It was a very rich and intelligent environment. Unfortunately, it was apparently difficult to develop for. Very few applications ever used the guide features.

Now, there's nothing like that. Apple Help has been basic HTML since sometime in the Mac OS 8/9 family. A lot of applications have it. But none can guide you through events, like organizing bookmarks in Safari. Now you just have a collection of paragraphs like:

To add a bookmark to the Bookmarks menu, open the webpage and click the Add Bookmark button in the address bar. Type a name for the bookmark and choose Bookmarks Menu from the pop-up menu.
Some help files contain links, usually to other help files or to the web, and on rare occasion to certain control panel elements. But it's still pretty weak.

Hopefully, now that AppleScript supports full GUI scripting, Apple might think of combining AppleScript and Apple Help to allow for more interactive help files.