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Article:
  Help Yourself Help Others
Subject:   Anyone make this work?
Date:   2004-09-11 19:32:54
From:   steve_bryan
Can anyone get these instructions to work? Like many otherwise helpful articles I suppose I'm missing something simple or the author left out something that was supposed to be obvious. Whatever the case is I'm missing something and I never get a positive response for my Cocoa app when I try to select from the Help menu. When I goggled the topic on comp.sys.mac.programers.* there seem to be a lot of people facing a similar situation. It seems as though there is some piece of the puzzle which isn't quite being revealed.


What has me puzzled is why they think something is finished when it is as fragile as this. If you want developers to make help available then make it easy, not a black art to provide. Maybe make a utility application that causes all the right things to happen whether you know all the secret handshakes. Damn this gets frustrating.
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  • Anyone make this work?
    2004-09-11 21:55:54  steve_bryan [Reply | View]

    Here is the step that was missing in my earlier attempt. The text that appears in the Help menu item in your MainMenu.nib file is crucial. It has to exactly match the text you have entered elsewhere or the whole thing simply, quietly fails. So, for instance, if you have multiple targets that are slight variants and they have different names to avoid collisions, those variations will prevent the instructions given above from working. It is for reasons like this that the "for dummies" series have been so successful. You assume almost nothing and explain in complete detail so that trivial errors are avoided. Oh, well. It only slowed me down a few hours.

    For others encountering this topic I would recommend the instructions about Help given in the documentation folder of the Developer folder. In particular the Tutorial points out the pitfall that got me.
    • Anyone make this work?
      2005-12-22 08:00:57  smythm [Reply | View]

      Thanks for this one, dude.
      --
      smythy (http://www.palim-palim.com)