Help Crafter 4+

Takes a lot of the pain away

There’s a reason a lot of Mac apps in the app store don’t have Mac Help files - it’s because the process is one of THE most terrifyingly painful things for a developer to have to do. You’d think that adding a help file to an app should be easy, and something which Apple might want to encourage. But despite Apple’s (too?) extensive documentation it still leaves developers scratching their heads on just where to start. This app takes away most of that pain, thankfully.

However, getting the generated help file to work in an XCode project is still not quite as straight forward as this app’s built-in help might suggest. I had to create a folder (called “HelpBook” in my case) in the project directory (the same one that has Base.lproj and Images.xcassets), then drag that into the Project Navigator in XCode and telling it to create folder references (such that it appears blue, not yellow). Then I copied into that the generated Whatever.help file from this app. My “Help Book directory name” value in Info.plist is now “HelpBook/Whatever.help”, and my app is now able to show the help correctly. One area where this app could improve would be to document this nightmare better (since it seems to have eluded Apple), which would put a smile on the faces of the poor souls who have to create help files, and add value.

I’d give the app 5 stars if it allowed me to create a basic table of information in a page (I tried to be sneaky and copied and pasted a basic table from Pages but that made the app hang). I also don’t see a way to specify the icon for generated help pages. Indented bullets don’t indent completely in the generated Help file. Mostly small issues but these would be nice to get fixed/improved.