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Re: IDL Help on Mac OS [message #67031 is a reply to message #67030]

Thu, 25 June 2009 09:00

JDS
Messages: 94
Registered: March 2009

Member

On Jun 24, 2:05 pm, "Kenneth P. Bowman" <k-bow...@null.edu> wrote:
> In article <MPG.24abfa0d38deee0798a...@news.giganews.com>,
> David Fanning <n...@dfanning.com> wrote:
>
>> Kenneth P. Bowman writes:
>
>>> The whole thing is a continuous irritation. Has anyone found
>>> another way to use Help that is not so intrusive?
>
>> OK, scratch the Mac from my list of potential new
>> computers. :-(
>
>> Cheers,
>
>> David
>
> What's so jarring about the IDL Help is that it is so un-Mac-like. Mac applications
> generally coexist peacefully and all operate in pretty much the same
> way. No other Mac application I know of operates like this.
>
> I wouldn't mind having an IDL Help application in the Dock if it actually did
> something, but this weird arrangement where there is an application with no
> real user interface, while the actual help window is in the browser, is very
> unintuitive to long-time Mac users.
>
> Mainly I want to be able to hide the IDL Help 99% of the time and not have it
> in my face every time I switch to my web browser.

Full agreement. An additional irritation is it spawns a new browser
window/tab for each and every help invocation. I have IDLWAVE working
with it (out soon I hope), and find it a fair bit less compelling than
the old Assistant. One advantage I do note is the ability to use
bookmarks and full text searching in the browser. If you use Spaces, I
find that if you keep one browser window in the space where IDL runs,
it will target that one preferentially. Then just remember to close
the accumulating tabs occasionally, and the irritation factor goes
down.

My understanding of how this thing actually works is:

1. Locally spawn a JAVA-based local web server bundled with IDL/
Eclipse. Wait 10s for it to start.
2. Decompress the HTML files which are no longer bundled as stand-
alone, but in some opaque format.
3. Send a command to the browser to query the resource intensive and
completely unnecessary local web server, so that it can read a simple
HTML file recovered in step #2, and pass it off to the browser.

Compare this to the old method:

1. Use a browser (or Assistant, just a glorified browser) to look at
the local relevant HTML file.
2. There is no step 2.

That said, this is Eclipse's help system, not IDL's, so they may feel
their hands are tied. How does it work on other OS's?

JD

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[Message index]

		Re: IDL Help on Mac OS By: JDS on Fri, 26 June 2009 09:17
		Re: IDL Help on Mac OS By: Kenneth P. Bowman on Fri, 26 June 2009 08:00
		Re: IDL Help on Mac OS By: David Fanning on Fri, 26 June 2009 07:18
		Re: IDL Help on Mac OS By: David Klassen on Fri, 26 June 2009 07:11
		Re: IDL Help on Mac OS By: wallabadah on Thu, 25 June 2009 21:21
		Re: IDL Help on Mac OS By: Michael Galloy on Thu, 25 June 2009 09:49
		Re: IDL Help on Mac OS By: David Fanning on Thu, 25 June 2009 09:20
		Re: IDL Help on Mac OS By: JDS on Thu, 25 June 2009 09:00
		Re: IDL Help on Mac OS By: Kenneth P. Bowman on Wed, 24 June 2009 11:05
		Re: IDL Help on Mac OS By: Michael Galloy on Wed, 24 June 2009 09:19
		Re: IDL Help on Mac OS By: rogass on Wed, 24 June 2009 09:09
		Re: IDL Help on Mac OS By: David Fanning on Wed, 24 June 2009 08:54

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