Well, my Leopard Feature Presentation didn’t get off to a positive start yesterday when I blasted Leopard’s so-called New Desktop. But today, I’m going to take things to a more positive note by looking at one of the new Leopard features that I’m very happy to see: the new Help menu and Help Viewer.

Now, the Help menu may not seem like the most important aspect for someone like me, but from Apple’s point of view, it should be a big deal. With more and more people switching to a Mac, it should be a priority for Apple to make the Mac platform accessible not just for people who are new to computers, but even to people who come from a Windows environment and have never used a Mac before. Apple started down this path in Tiger, when they added a search box to System Preferences where users could search for the setting they wanted to change and System Preferences would take them there. That search box was even familiar with Windows lingo–someone searching for “wallpaper” would be directed towards “Desktop & Screen Saver”, for example.

However, for all of the revolutions that Mac OS X has brought to the computer market, Help Viewer has always felt like it was developed by the guy who invented the wheel. Each Mac OS X update has brought new changes to the Help Viewer, but they’ve never really felt quite right, and Help Viewer has always felt hobbled, in a way. Leopard, however, is the first time where Help Viewer has felt like a much more complete and accessible system to really be useful.

The first major improvement is the Help menu. The Help menu now includes a built-in Search box (like a lite version of Spotlight), which you can type in. As you type, the Help menu will then return a list of help results, and selecting any of these results will open them up in Help Viewer. Help Viewer, however, is no longer a full-blown app of its own, but one of the various “mini-apps” (I’ll be using that term more times this month) that opens a smaller window within the application that you’re already in with the answer. The window is still reminiscent of the old Help Viewer, and still lets you search across the various help databases. However, the new “minimalist” interface downplays the application as a whole and brings the focus on help for the app that you’re currently working in.

However, another clever thing that Apple has built-into the Help search is menu items. Suppose you’re in Safari, and you go to the Help menu and search for “bookmarks”. (Note that this is an unlikely example, given that there’s an entire menu in Safari for Bookmarks.) Not only would the Help menu return all of the help topics related to bookmarks, but it will also list all of the menu items related to bookmarks. If you hover over the item in the Help menu, then the corresponding menu item will be revealed with a big, blue, impossible-to-miss arrow pointing directly at the menu item so you know exactly where it is for the future. Clicking on that item in the Help menu will run the action for that particular menu item. This automatically works with any Mac OS X application.

Oh, and for those apps that add their own menu items in the Help menu, those remain visible as well.

What do I think the next evolution of this feature should be? If searching in the Help menu can reveal and point out menu items, perhaps this could be used to point out certain buttons inside applications. My parents are often summoning me over to find out where a certain button is in an application window, and I think it would be cool if they could search for it in the Help menu and see a blue impossible-to-see arrow point it out somewhere on the screen. Of course, that would require developers to include support for that in their applications, and might be a little bit of an over-commitment. Still, it’s an idea.

Nevertheless, the new Help menu and Help Viewer in Mac OS X Leopard is a really wonderful system and an equation that I’d say Apple has finally nailed to make Mac OS X accessible to any new Mac user, and it’s one of those features that makes me proud to use a Mac.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: accessiblity, Apple, features, Help, Help Viewer, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, Macs, menu, review, search, switchers