"Help" system revisited

[mike engles]

Hello

I have had Photoshop 6 for the last 5 or 6 weeks.

If you can get help by pressing F1, then you are one of the lucky ones. A lot of people on the Adobe forum cannot get it to work. I cannot UNLESS my browser is open. If I do not have a running browser I do not get help.

Think of all the resources that have to be given up to run IE5 or other, just to get help.

Personally I find it useless as it is just the Photoshop book in HTML format. The XARA help has much more information in it.

Also as far as I can tell the Photoshop help is not context sensitive.

Actually I have removed everything to do with Adobe Online.

I also hope that you are one of the lucky ones(I am) that is not having trouble with running Photoshop 6. There have been problems with networks and removable media.

Mike Engles

[Big Frank]

Well they know how to keep the price of a world-beating graphics app (and, yes, it is brilliant) in the 'professional' range whilst still managing to sell bucketloads of it so making a handsome profit and being able to afford to spend time on a fancy help gui.

Any comments, Xara? [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[jens g.r. benthien]

OK XARA users, all your pros and cons are nice, BUT:

The Win Help System is superior to anything else you can get. It's advantage: you don't have to install resource hungry browser with a 30 meg footprint on your system and **keep it open** all the time. That means the XARA HELP is just there when you need it, even on a machine without a browser.

As fas as I remember, the XARA upgrade sells for US$ 69 and not for hundreds of US$ - a very fair offer, don't you think so? In addition, XARA is far better in programming than 99% of the rest of the packages in this area. It comes with one of the smallest footprints on the harddrive, hence the most elaborate tools I've ever seen in the Mac and Win world.

If you want an elaborate Help System embedded in Win Help, check out Rino 3D (www.rhino3D.com) - no html help system can beat this one. Excellent screenshots, hyperlinks etc, step-by-step guides - but this packages carries a totally different price tag.

Don't expect everything for free. Sit down yourself and try to write a help system...Soooo, either calm down or promise to pay a higher price! I think the developers deserve an income and revenue as well as you designers who use the tools they develop for **you**.

Believe it or not, I would even pay an extra amount for a full featured help system that includes step-by-step guides etc. Aren't you spending extra funds for plug-ins? Consider a fancy help system being a separate plug-in or module, and decide if you would pay for it. Be honest: you charge your customers for the extra little martian in the upper right corner as well!

Too bad that XARA has to hit the market with low prices, just to keep the market share. The products are far superior than any other packages on the market, but the biggies only want to pull the funds out of your pockets (yes, I mean Adobe or Corel or Macromedia).

I will support XARA, because if you only have a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail...

This is my 5 cents worth of comment.

jens g.r. benthien
creative director
Genesis II Networks, LLC
Charlotte, NC 28208

[ED]

If a picture is worth a thousand words then a movie with sound is worth a million words.

A Help system is supposed to help by answering the question HOW. How do I..... [fill in whatever is missing here]

Some packages (unlike Xara) just don't get it. I've seen thousands of them. They tell you "what" this and that is but do little about "how" to use it. So you end up with a massive, cluttered Help System that is 5% "how" and the other 95% useless "what" information. Now your stuck with looking for the remaining useful 5% in a vast wasteland of "what" this and that does. I'm thinking needle in hay stack here, are you to? These type of "help?" systems are TOTALLY USELESS!!

Keep up the good work Xara with your Context Sensitive MULTIMEDIA Help by maximizing the WinHelp system. It just does not get any better than this at any cost! For those of you who have not yet experiences this, your in for a big surprise. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

.... stepping down from podium now ....

The BEST is good enough!

[This message was edited by ED on December 10, 2000 at 08:10 AM.]

[Soquili]

Hello everyone,

It looks like everyone has an opinion about help systems. I of course have mine, so I'll share it.

There is a way to have context sensitive help and html help in one package. Microsoft released their html help system about three years ago. They were a little dissatisfied with the old WinHelp system themselves.

If the programmers at Xara Ltd. are interested, they can download the Html Help workshop from the following URL
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/to...p/download.htm

It includes a nice program that can convert an existing WinHelp to HtmlHelp.

Of course, there would be some changes to the program code to implement the htmlhelp verses the winhelp.

I hope this doesn't delay the CD release of Xara X. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[tomh]

I don't understand the argument that Xara should use html for their help system. Both Windows Help and html are means of delivering hypertext. Windows Help is more efficient because it is specifically designed for help systems. Html is not particularly good at anything and the standard spends most of its time trying to catch up with the latest fads in Web design. However, if this discussion is about the style of Xara help, then the means of implementing it doesn't make any difference.

Personally, I think Xara's help is one of the best in the business. The balance of text and graphics suits me fine (there are dozens of helpful pictures by the way). Klaus' example from Photoshop demonstrates a common failing with graphics-heavy help systems, pictures are included that add nothing to the information content. For example, above the no doubt useful captions "The slice tool creates slices" and "The slice selection tool selects slices" are pictures that do nothing to explain what slicing is about.

A well chosen picture can speak a thousand words, but irrelevant pictures simply drive users to the dozens of expensive books that explain (in words) how to use Photoshop.

Tom

[Mick Robinson]

One reason why we've stuck with the WinHelp system is that it's suitable for all versions of Windows. HTMLHelp (Microsoft's single-file help system) requires parts of IE to work. That's fine on W98 and W2000 which have in-built support but not for W95. We didn't want to bundle a chunk of IE with the download and so make it bigger.