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UniHelp 1.1
Issue: 1.1 (August/September 2002)
Author: Brian Jones
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,377
Starting Page Number: 10
Article Number: 1020
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Excerpt of article text...
The ability of REALbasic to compile for multiple platforms has meant a wider audience for developers who otherwise may not have had the opportunity to reach Windows users. The other side of having access to this expanded audience, however, is the sometimes tedious task of accomodating different interface standards on the different platforms. When it comes to help systems, the task of recreating the help information in the several different platform-specific formats can occupy important resources in the finishing out process before application release. UniHelp from Electric Butterfly makes these problems a thing of the past with its universal, multi-platform help interface. Configuring the impressive array of customizable attributes for the UniHelp interface is quick and creating the content is as simple as working in your favorite text editor.
UniHelp, when included in a user's application, manages a self-contained help window with a simple interface. On the left side of the window is a ListBox that can be hierarchical if needed. Each element in the ListBox corresponds to a different text clipping which will be displayed in the scrollable EditField on the right side of the window. The help items can be browsed in this list, or the user can search for key words. Easy navigation butttons are accompanied by a print button at the top of the window.
Including UniHelp in a project is simple. In the Project window, the user must import the UniHelp module and the UniHelpGraphics folder. A short clipping of code which has been supplied in the UniHelp documentation should be inserted at the Help menu event handler which will create the window. A segment of this code can be adjusted so that certain properties of the UniHelp object can be set to customize the UniHelp interface. All of the text clippings displayed in the help window are written to disk in a directory entitled "Help." The user creates plain text or HTML files and names them according to an easy-to-learn naming convention that determines their ordering and display in the UniHelp window.
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