About The Help Manager
You can use the Help Manager to provide your users with Balloon Help on-line assistance-information that describes the actions,
behaviors, or properties of elements of your application. When the
user turns on Balloon Help assistance, the Help Manager displays small help balloons as the user moves the cursor over areas such as
scroll bars, buttons, menus, or rectangular areas in your windows.
Help balloons are rounded-rectangle windows that contain explanatory
information for the user. (With tips pointing at the objects they
annotate, help balloons look like the balloons used for dialog in comic
strips.) You provide the content for these help balloons in the form of
de scriptive text or pictures. The information should be short and
pertinent to the object or element that the cursor is over. For
example, when a user moves the cursor to a menu command, a help
balloon pointing to that command explains its function. The help
balloon is displayed until the user moves the cursor away.
The user turns on Balloon Help on-line assistance for all applications
by choosing the Show Balloons command from the Help menu. All
normally available features of your application are still active when
Balloon Help is enabled. The help balloons only provide information;
the actions that the user performs by pressing the mouse button still
take effect as they normally would.
present.
information for the menus, windows, dialog boxes, or alert boxes used
by your application, desk accessory, control panel, Chooser extension,
or other software that interacts with the user. If you presently offer
another help facility for your users, you should now let users gain
access to your information through the Help menu. The
Help Manager topics explain how you can add your own menu items to the Help menu to provide one convenient and consistent place for the
user to look for help information.
You can provide help for the menus, dialog boxes, and alert boxes of
your existing applications, desk accessories, or control panels by
simply adding resources to your resource fork. In addition, you can
provide help for the content area of windows by using either resources
To use the Help Manager, you also should be familiar with the application by storing the information regarding help balloons in
resources. To provide help for menus, windows, dialog boxes, or alert
You can use the Help Manager to provide help for these elements of your application:
• menu titles and menu items
• dialog boxes and alert boxes
• windows, including any object in the frame or content area
• other application- defined areas
Providing help balloons for menus, dialog boxes, or alert boxes is
quite simple: you need only create resources containing the help
information that you want to relay to the user. The Help Manager automatically sizes, positions, and draws the help balloon and its
content for you. It is equally simple to provide help balloons for a
window whose elements do not change location within its content area.
It takes a little more work to provide help balloons for windows in
your application that contain objects that are dynamic or that change
their position within the content area of the window. You provide
Balloon Help assistance for these objects by tracking the cursor
yourself and using Help Manager routines to display help balloons. You can let the Help Manager remove the help balloon, or your application can determine when to remove the help balloon.
The user turns on Balloon Help on-line assistance by choosing Show
Balloons from the Help menu. The Help menu is identified by an icon
consisting of a question mark enclosed in a small help balloon. It
appears to the left of the Application menu (and to the left of the
Keyboard menu, if a non-Roman script system is installed) and to the
right of all other menus. Users can turn on Balloon Help assistance
even when your application presents a modal dialog box, because the
Help menu is always enabled.
displays any help balloons for the current application whenever the
user moves the cursor over a rectangular area that has a help balloon
associated with it.
windows and displays default help balloons for the title bar and other
parts of the active window. The Help Manager also displays default help balloons for other standard elements of an application's user
interface.
describes the default help balloons. (Though you probably will not
want or need to change the messages in these default balloons, you have
the ability to do so. For more information, see
displays the default help balloons for your application whenever
Balloon Help assistance is enabled, even if your application does not
explicitly use or create help balloons.
All normal features of your application are available when Balloon
Help assistance is on. The Help Manager can display a balloon when the mouse button is pressed as well as when the mouse button is up.
Help balloons do not interfere with your application. The user can still
click and double-click as normal when Balloon Help assistance is
enabled.
The display of help balloons is driven mainly by the action of the
user. For those balloons defined as standard help resource types, the
Help Manager automatically tracks the cursor and generates the shape and calculates the position for the help balloon. The
Help Manager displays each help balloon as the user moves the cursor to the area associated with it. The Help Manager removes the help balloon when the cursor is no longer over the associated area.
Once the user chooses Show Balloons, help is enabled for all
applications. When the user chooses Hide Balloons from the Help
menu, the Help Manager removes any visible help balloon and stops displaying help balloons until Balloon Help assistance is turned on
again.
help balloons and
information on the default help balloons.
• create the text or picture content for help balloons
• create resources for help balloons for menus, dialog boxes, and
alert boxes
• create resources for help balloons for windows
• add your own menu items to the Help menu
• override the default help balloons provided by system software
• write your own balloon definition function