Introduction to Providing User Assistance With Apple Help

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:

Apple Help Concepts describes the Help Viewer application and introduces the Apple Help API.

Authoring User Help shows how you can create a basic help book and describes how to use the Apple Help Indexing Tool to index your help book.

Registering Your Help Book describes how to register your help book with Help Viewer.

Opening Your Help Book in Help Viewer shows how to use the Apple Help functions to access and display help book content from your application..

Apple Help Meta Tag Properties lists the meta tags specific to Apple Help. You can use these tags to control how your help content is displayed.

Apple Help URLs lists Apple Help URLs that you can use to link to help pages and other resources.

Apple Help Segments lists the commands you can use to

See Also

For a detailed description of the Apple Help application programming interface, see the <!--a target="_self" -->Apple Help Reference<!--/a--> . For information on Carbon help tags, see Providing Help Tags in Carbon and the <!--a target="_self" -->Carbon Help Manager Reference<!--/a--> .

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

For guidelines on how to use help effectively within your application, see <!--a target="_self" -->Apple Human Interface Guidelines<!--/a--> .

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