Introduction to Providing User Assistance With Apple Help

This document describes Apple Help, the HTML-based system for providing online user assistance in Mac OS X. Apple Help is the primary help system for the Mac OS and is designed to deliver online topic-based user help, such as is often provided in user manuals and lists of frequently asked questions (FAQ). Carbon, Cocoa, and Java applications can use Apple Help in Mac OS X. If you are creating an application, plug-in, or other software product with a user interface for Mac OS X v10.3 or earlier, you should read this document to learn how to create an Apple Help help book and display it in Help Viewer.

Apple Help offers significant advantages over static help documents, such as Read Me files or manuals in PDF, to teach your users how to use your products more effectively. The benefits of adopting Apple Help for user assistance include these:

When you use Apple Help, you can supply HTML-based user assistance and integrate it into your application with relatively little effort. Apple Help manages and displays help books; a help book is the collection of HTML files that constitute the user help for your software product. When you supply a help book and register it with Apple Help, users can access your help from your user interface and view it in Help Viewer without any additional work on your part.

The Apple Help system includes these components:

System Requirements

Help Viewer and the Apple Help API are available in Mac OS X version 10.0 and later. They are also available in Mac OS 8.6 and later for Carbon applications. The Apple Help Indexing Tool is available in Mac OS X in /Developer/Applications/Utilities when the Developer package is installed.

Organization of This Document

This document includes the following chapters and appendixes:

See Also

For a detailed description of the Apple Help application programming interface, see the Apple Help Reference. For information on Carbon help tags, seeProviding Help Tags in Carbon and the Carbon Help Manager Reference.

For information on help tags, or tooltips, in Cocoa applications, seeOnline Help.

For guidelines on how to use help effectively within your application, see Apple Human Interface Guidelines.