Falling in love with VoodooPad again
A few years ago I used VoodooPad Lite extensively. Every note, to-do list, and feature description went into it. At some point I migrated away from VoodooPad to a combination of text files and Ta-da list, perhaps fearing I would have too much data in a weird format that would be difficult to get at later.
But I was always on the lookout for a problem that would best be solved with VoodooPad again. With our localized help files for Bookshelf 4.1, I tried for most of a day to use VoodooPad to manage the help. I even experimented with Gus's dead project for remote wiki editing, thinking I would write my own web-based help-specific wiki system and plug Boomerang into it. In the end it was too difficult to force the existing static help files into VoodooPad.
Fast-forward to a few nights ago. Wii Transfer 1.5 has no Apple Help at all, and it needs some. A perfect opportunity for VoodooPad, and I'm happy to report that the solution works beautifully. I knew I could make it work because clearly VoodooPad's own help files are managed with VoodooPad. After a bit of experimentation I bought a new VoodooPad license and all was well in the world.
Here's how it works:
- I manage the help content in VoodooPad, creating pages for different help sections and generally just typing away and getting stuff done.
- The HTML export template lives inside the VoodooPad document itself, so everything is in one place.
- Also inside the VoodooPad document is a post-processing script (written in Ruby) that looks for a comment in index.html and inserts the appropriate AppleTitle and AppleIcon meta tags that Apple Help needs to get its work done.
The only part I haven't finished yet is that the script should also send the files off to Help Indexer to update the search index. I coded that part but it doesn't work yet -- there is something different about how VoodooPad executes these scripts that prevents other applications from launching. (Maybe. I'll sort it out eventually.)
You can watch a screencast of the process here. I add a new page, enter some filler text, export the VoodooPad document, then re-run the Xcode project and view the changes in Apple Help. Fun!
January 6, 2007 12:21 AM [link] -
