Help Content

[trevandcal]

Hi. I seem to be having trouble with the Help Menu. If I do a search for a topic I get a number of hits but when I click through the help dialog box is empty. If I manually click through the menus there's plenty of information - just not when I click though on a search. Running a MBP.

Screen shots as below. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

 

Thanks!

 

[R C-R]

I am not sure it is the same thing, but sometimes when I do a search in the help window, the window is empty for a while & there is a thin, easy to miss blue line in the border between the header with the buttons & the content area that grows in length from left to right while (I assume) the help topic database is being updated. It acts like a typical Mac OS progress bar, just a very thin one. Once it reaches the right end of the window, the search results appear.

[v_kyr]

You can alternatively use the online help system ( APh online help here ). - Though the Google search there often also isn't that accurate.

 

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Though the Google search there often also isn't that accurate.

But it almost always is better than the built-in help system's search function, & shows search results a lot quicker, too.

That isn't too surprising -- there is no way the computational power available locally on a desktop system can compete with the massive computational power available in Google's server farms.

[MEB]

Hi trevandcal,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
Are you running Mojave? If so there's a few issues with the Help we are still looking into. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Meanwhile you can use the online help as an alternative (assuming you have internet access available).

[v_kyr]

8 minutes ago, R C-R said:

But it almost always is better than the built-in help system's search function, & shows search results a lot quicker, too.

That isn't too surprising -- there is no way the computational power available locally on a desktop system can compete with the massive computational power available in Google's server farms. 

Well usually you don't need server farms in order to index a finite number of HTML text pages in an appropriate way here. Instead it's more a matter of the used help systems and it's used algorithms for indexing and of course to be diligent yourself when include additional tags and metadata for accurate indexing purposes.

• Apple - Indexing Your Help Book

Google also does it automatically and algorithmic. Further think about having a bad bandwidth or no internet at all under certain situations, of what help is Google then?

Siri can you hear me? - Oh damn no internet connection ...

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Well usually you don't need server farms in order to index a finite number of HTML text pages in an appropriate way here. Instead it's more a matter of the used help systems and it's used algorithms for indexing and of course to be diligent yourself when include additional tags and metadata for accurate indexing purposes.

Google largely eliminates the dependency on developer created keyword & anchor tags by leveraging its highly sophisticated algorithms, massive computing power, & fractional millisecond access to enormous amounts of stored data, making it possible to generate & determine the relevancy of its search results literally at eye-blink speeds. (For example, a search on "live filter" generated over 200 results in just over 0.1 seconds.)

Of course, you do need an internet connection to use the online version of the help, but from what I have experienced with that that blue progress bar thing, you may need that to update the built-in help topics as well.

[v_kyr]

9 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Google largely eliminates the dependency on developer created keyword & anchor tags by ...

So did other resources before and still do, thus it always depends on the used algorithms and supported search strategies. Of course nowadays Google is the leader of the pack and hard to beat here. They have a big advantage over the rest of the world (maybe too big). - In the past we used a lot Lucene for more powerful search facilities in various bigger Java based projects, of course there are similar implementations/solutions avalable for other prog languages too.

 

[R C-R]

23 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Of course nowadays Google is the leader of the pack and hard to beat here.

That is because their searches are powered by hundreds of algorithms they have been refining for far longer than anybody else. They even have multiple algorithms that determine which other algorithms are the best ones to use in what combinations to generate the most relevant results in the shortest possible time.

Google also invests what amounts to the GDP of a small to medium sized country into the research, development, & deployment of the hardware it all runs on, including the resources to supply the energy that powers it. Not many of its competitors can do that, much less on the same massive scale.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

...Not many of its competitors can do that, much less on the same massive scale.

If you dominate a segment, use quitly ruthless strategies and so are finally over long time the one making most out of it, also in terms of money, no wonder.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

If you dominate a segment, use quitly ruthless strategies and so are finally over long time the one making most out of it, also in terms of money, no wonder.

So what is the alternative? Google dominates because they do make the most out of it, both in terms of user experience & in revenue.

PageRank was a brilliant idea. At the time, the established leaders in the search engine world took way to long to understand how powerful it was or how disruptive it would be. By the time they did, Google was already building on that, applying other brilliant ideas about what users actually want search engines to do to further distance it from the competition.

They did not resort to using ruthless strategies to force anybody to use Google; they just made it so effective at what it does that people wanted to use it. The only way to compete with that is to come up with something people will want to use more than Google.

[v_kyr]

It's always good to have competition, it's good for the market and against monopoly position, but some companies (like Google, Amazon, FB/Insta/WA ...) got too big and dominant in this regard.

12 minutes ago, R C-R said:

The only way to compete with that is to come up with something people will want to use more than Google.

Difficult once you have such a market & money power behind you, they can easily buy your enterprise or destroy your efforts by establishing/making or building something similar. Further IT laws and the "General Data Protection Regulation" are different for certain regions of the world now and many of the previously named companies benefited a lot from times where regulations were very lax. Nowadays things do slightly change (at least in Europe here) and partly a different wind blows.