Help Contents & Documentation

[augustinelo]

I miss the help manual and documentation in V3. In V3, I can access the help manual and search for a specific keyword to locate the documentation for the command of feature I need to look up. Actually the documentation in V3 can solve a lot of problems I have without calling Promethean support. In Inspire, I have quite some difficult time in locating the correct documentation for the command I have questions with. There is no search keyword available in the help. Another point I would suggest is to use a window help manual system, rather than using default browser for HTML, as involving Internet Explorer (my default HTML browser) will consume quite some memory in my computer, while using Windows Help system could save some valuable system memory resources for ActiveInspre.

Best regards,

Augustine

[SabineL]

Hi Augustine,

thank you for starting this thread.
Work on the help is ongoing and we will do our best to use your feedback to improve and expand it.

Yes, Winhelp is less memory-hungry, but it's only for Windows, while ActivInspire is designed to work on Windows, Mac and Linux. We are investigating how to speed up the help without changing the format, so watch this space.

As you point out, a keyword search function would be a great benefit and I'll investigate how this could be implemented.

Thanks again for taking the time to let us know what you think.
Keep the feedback coming!

Kind regards,

Sabine
Technical Author
Promethean Ltd

[augustinelo]

Hi Sabine,

Thanks a lot for your prompt reply. Promethean is doing really good support through the use of the Forum [clap]

I can see the difficulties in desigining Inspire user interface to run on three different platforms, and actually the first production release of Inspire is way better tha I expect, it is very stable and usable, the engineering & design teams are doing an excellent job.

There is another feature, context sensitive help in V3 that I think is very useful to users. In V3, when I right click the tools in the toolbox, the help section in that particular tool will come up and I can dig out the information I need. Also, in most of the pop up windows, like toolstore, Pen modifier tools window, I can see a "?" icon at the top right hand corner of the window, and if I have question on how to use these tools, I can easily click that"?" icon to pop up the relevant documentation. It would be best if the design team can put these features back again.

Best regards,

Augustine

[SabineL]

Hi again,

I totally agree, context sensitive help can make a big difference to usability. I'll raise it with the development team, since context sensitive help is a joint effort.

And now for the good news :)
I've figured out how to build in proper keyword searching and will include this in the next release of the help file. In the first release, I opted for pure, list-based HTML, to make sure everyone sees the same thing. The price of this was reduced flexibility in the navigation pane.

However, the newer compilation will allow the help to use elements like Java or DHTML if supported by the user's internet browser. If you still can't do keyword searching in the next release, it'll be either because your browser doesn't suppport DHTML, or because your institution's firewall settings don't allow Java applets.

I suspect a lot of educational institutions will button their browsers and firewalls down quite tightly, but hopefully a significant proportion of users will benefit from the enhanced search functionality.

Kind regards,
Sabine

[dsmccracken]

What's the status of improving help searching, please?