Interactive help

Hi there,

I would like to add interactive help, “did you know” and assistance to my app… My idea is to popup some bubble able to show static or animated content, text & graphical, depending on the context / user actions.

I was interested in the transparent Flash player, but it seems to be designed for Windows only. I need to be Windows/Mac compatible.

Any suggestion?

Thanks in advance,

/Phil

I’m sure something similar is possible on OSX, but I don’t really know much about Flash, sorry!

I don’t need to use Flash actually… I’m open to any other solution :smiley:

popup a web browser and do your tutorial in HTML 5 and javascript ?

I’m doing something similar, i’m trying to do interactive help for my app. Most of what i have in my app are ValueTrees and PropertyPanels i decided to re-work all the PropertyComponents, so that the name label is clickable and points to a Wiki namespace with a description of that property. Since i have a lot of those properties and Wiki can be edited by anyone anyone who uses the app and has a bit of spare time can help making that documentation.

I didn’t go for any fancy popups cause i didn’t want to bloat my app with translation and static string data, it’s all on the web now so i decided to use that.

Just an idea.

+1 to that, Flash is headed for the museum of ancient history.

Thanks for yor advice! :wink:

I tried a small popup web browser, it seems to be a good solution indeed. But Since my application must work also on computers not connected to internet, I need to save binary data from my code to temporary files to allow the web browser finding its content locally (html and image files)… do you know a way to use the web browser providing directly the content (html code + images) from the application code?

I believe most browsers support “file:///” URI syntax:

File URI Scheme

You can use a juce File object to construct the path in a platform-independent fashion, based on where you have installed the help html.

yes indeed, it is exactly what I did, but I’m wondering if it would be possible to inject HTML and image data from the application code to the web browser component instead of making it pointing to temporary files… My application is monolytic, help content should be embedded in the executable.

Have your app open a local socket that implements a simple webserver and point the browser at localhost:(your port).

Don;t do that, it will cause problems in each platform with firewalls and security stuff. Create a temp file and use the file:// scheme. You really can’t load a memory blob into a browser as it’s content i tried it some time ago, at least not with JUCE, i’m not event sure if it can be done. A temp file with file:// is the safest way.