{"id":30128,"date":"2020-09-16T16:01:16","date_gmt":"2020-09-16T20:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=30128"},"modified":"2020-09-14T15:31:09","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T19:31:09","slug":"authoring-mac-help-books-in-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/09\/16\/authoring-mac-help-books-in-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Authoring Mac Help Books in 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/marioaguzman.wordpress.com\/2020\/09\/12\/auth\/\">Mario Guzman<\/a> (<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MarioGuzman\/status\/1304950389532291072\">tweet<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/marioaguzman.wordpress.com\/2020\/09\/12\/auth\/\"><p>Apple&rsquo;s own documentation for Apple Help has moved to the documentation archive on their developer site. You&rsquo;ll find tons of questions on Stack Overflow and other&#8230; more questionable sites. Apple did do a <em>minor<\/em> revision to their documentation back in 2013. 2013!!!<\/p><p>By now, 2020, Apple Help is neglected and well, crusty. Very crusty (<a href=\"https:\/\/developer.apple.com\/videos\/play\/wwdc2015\/408\/\">no, not that Crusty<\/a>). It still works but certain parts of it don&rsquo;t seem to work as well anymore. Not sure why it&rsquo;s neglected. They advise you include a <a href=\"https:\/\/developer.apple.com\/design\/human-interface-guidelines\/macos\/user-interaction\/help#apple-help\">Help Book in their HIG<\/a> that was recently published &mdash; and they link to the documentation (from 2013). Personally, I think they have a lot of potential and a lot to offer. I just wish this was a component at Apple that would get some attention in both development and documentation.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>I spent countless hours and days trying to piece together all the information from all corners of the internet to build a Help Book. It was super frustrating and excruciatingly time consuming. I don&rsquo;t want anyone else to feel this way so I hope this speeds things up for the next Mac Developer who wants to include a Help Book with their awesome app!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I prefer the <code>hiutil<\/code> command-line tool over the Help Indexer app because I can invoke it from my build script.<\/p>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/08\/28\/live-help-menu-searching-via-nsuserinterfaceitemsearching\/\">Live Help Menu Searching via NSUserInterfaceItemSearching<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mario Guzman (tweet): Apple&rsquo;s own documentation for Apple Help has moved to the documentation archive on their developer site. You&rsquo;ll find tons of questions on Stack Overflow and other&#8230; more questionable sites. Apple did do a minor revision to their documentation back in 2013. 2013!!!By now, 2020, Apple Help is neglected and well, crusty. Very [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2020-09-16T20:01:20Z","apple_news_api_id":"285ca51d-bddb-4d9f-b100-ffd11cf2a289","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-09-16T20:01:20Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AKFylHb3bTZ-xAP_RHPKiiQ","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1658,69,164,30,1666,71],"class_list":["post-30128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-apple-help","tag-cocoa","tag-documentation","tag-mac","tag-macos-10-15","tag-programming"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30128"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30133,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30128\/revisions\/30133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}