example of interactive manual for web app

Question

I have requirement to write help(for example show description of what some button does) for my web app. Are there any good examples for doing this?

Answer 1

Java Doc can be used to extract all the comments incorporated inside the java code file

Answer 2

Have a look at JavaHelp. Emulates the help system found in older versions of Windows

Answer 3

It's very modern to write the documentation in a Wiki. It's easy to edit, nice to structure etc.
But I hate it. I really hate it. It's never well structured and easy to read. There's much effort you have to put into a wiki to make it good.

So I recommend to use a simple CMS. No overkill, just text edit with links. You have the option to integrate it into your webapp and there's the possibility to extract a PDF from it.
This is neat for offering an offline help for printing etc.

Answer 4

I'd just use good old HTML/CSS - this will maintain the behavior users already know in a browser and you should already have the style-sheet for the application so you'll maintain the L&F through the help pages with little additional effort.

Take a look at the help on Google Maps (http://maps.google.co.uk/support/) - for layout ideas, etc.

One thing I did notice when I looked at the Google help pages was the search (no surprises there), which might be a little trickier - if your site is external facing then I'd implement this with the 'site:<your site>' keyword and use Google search. If your site is internal you'll have to roll your own search, but that shouldn't be too hard and would probably be quite a fun sub-project.

Answer 5

If you're using PHP, take a look at phpDocumentor.

The phpDocumentor tool is a standalone auto-documentor similar to JavaDoc written in PHP.

Answer 6

If you are looking at producing a user manual illustrating what each button does, I've found using something like Debugmode Wink or Adobe Captivate useful for recording the screen interaction and then converting it to either a Flash movie or PDF.

Answer 7

Specifically for Rails: http://github.com/darthapo/comatose/tree/master is a great little CMS tool that you can use for imbedded help systems.

Otherwise, http://tenderapp.com/ works nicely as a hosted solution.

Answer 8

I have found the help in the build engine Hudson to be very elegant and discrete.

You have a help icon, you click on it, the help text is expaned inline the page, you click again it disappears.

Try starting https://hudson.dev.java.net/hudson.jnlp and go tohttp://localhost:8080/configure and click the many (?) buttons in the right side.