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FWIW, I used a similar setup in 2000. The popup was tied to a field that
could be used in multiple procedures. The popup had links to the various
topics, and bore the heading: "What would you like to do?" Each procedural
topic link was an action item, like "Format the frammis". Yes, the popups
did disappear once clicked, but that was seen as a plus. The end users went
wild over it.
Jack DeLand . Principal
Adam Charles Consulting, LLC
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+jackdeland=comcast -dot- net -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+jackdeland=comcast -dot- net -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
Behalf Of Stuart Conner (stuconne)
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2017 4:54 AM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Context sensitive pop-ups (yehoshua paul)
Hooray for someone trying to do context sensitive pop-ups! Back in the late
1990's this was I believe called "What's This?" help. Although 'modern'
approaches to help are great at covering conceptual and procedural stuff,
they seem pretty hopeless at providing very specific information on
individual controls. For example, go to the Word advanced options page and
try to use Word help to find out *exactly* what the [Use Smart Cursoring]
checkbox is all about.
Anyway, back in 1998 we had "What's This?" help on one of our software
products that controlled a broadcast transmission system, so it had lots of
very technical settings and options on many of the screens. So we
implemented "What's This?" help by associating a control ID with each
control, mapping those with individual topics in (an early version of!)
RoboHelp, and triggering the help from the app would call the help engine
and pass the control ID, and a nice detailed popup would be displayed right
next to the control. The "What's This?" help could be triggered in any of 3
ways:
-- Select the [What's This?] option from the [Help] menu, then click on the
control on the screen to display the help text for that control.
-- Click the right-hand mouse button anywhere on the screen, select the
[Help] option from the popup menu displayed, then select the [What's This?]
option from the sub-menu, then click on the control.
-- Press the [Shift F1] key then click on the control.
Nice memories; happy days.
Stuart.
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