Help windows always foremost
I use Help frequently, particularly with a new system but also with applications. In Leopard the Help window is always on top. Often I find myself in the position of wishing to keep the Help file available but have an application window come to the front to work in the app. While the window of said app will become active the Help window always floats on top. I find it very annoying.
Is there a preference to change that behavior? A hack?
thanks
I too think this behavior is goofy in the extreme. You have the Help window open so you can work back and forth between Help and whatever you are doing: if the Help window is always on top you can't see what you are trying to do. What were they thinking? I was unable to find any way to fix this, although there might be such a way by modifying a plist somewhere and tell it to turn off always frontmost. Afraid I'm not enough of a hacker to know how one would go about this. Let's hope somewhere there is such a hacker who is annoyed enough to do it. You can't even hide the thing, it is always frontmost and will not hide, the best you can do is minimize it to the Dock. Sent feedback to Apple about this:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html/
At the moment that's best we can do.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder
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Thank you. That seemed to do the trick.
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Must 'Help' Windows Stay on Top?
Is there a way to have the 'Help" window act as every other window? When I am reading through a 'Help' topic the window always stays on top of all the other open windows. But when I want to return to my application the "Help" screen never recedes.
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Francine
Francine
Schwieder -
Just got a new iMac 20 inch. Mac help window is blank when opened. Type in a keyword or question, nothing happens. Click on drop-down menu to get Tiger home in the Help Viewer, click on topics on the right, nothing happens. Fix?
R C-R wrote: ""When you open a help page while you are connected, Help Viewer checks to see if a newer page is available and makes sure you see the latest information.""That does not apply to the start page for Mac Help. Likewise, the list of help books one sees in Help Viewer's Home pop-up button and the Library menu are cached on your Mac: no Internet connection involved.
R C-R wrote: "...at least one real-world case..."One data point does not make a trend. As you say, you have no idea what caused it, only inferring a causal relationship. I'm surprised Level 1 AppleCare did not simply tell you to Archive and Install and have a nice day: that's their usual level of troubleshooting.
I can see only one set of conditions where you might get a blank or partially loaded page in Help Viewer due to Internet issues: you'd have to be loading a help page that is only distributed over the Internet. Compared to the probability of other causes for a blank window, this cause has near-zero probability for the following reasons:
- There are very few pages like this in Mac Help and related help books, and they are relatively obscure, i.e. generally deep within help topics. One probably has a better chance of being struck by lightning than finding one of these at random when the other conditions were right. The pages themselves are never added to the help book that references them: they are only accessed via the Internet. However, the Mac Help main page is not one of them, nor is the list of help books as previously cited.
- You'd also have to have a very dodgy Internet connection indeed since help pages, esp. those for Apple apps, such as in Mac Help, are incredibly small: on the order of 4KB or less, almost none have page-specific graphics. The logos displayed in help pages are included with the help book, so they're not downloaded, even if the page is delivered over the Internet. A dodgy help server could contribute to this, but you'd get the "not found" page from Help Viewer, equivalent to a 404 from a Web browser. Help Viewer is a scaled-down Web browser. Help books are written in a subset of HTML and CSS. Authors of help books perform some additional processing as part of creating the help book to build its index, which is what is searched when one searches for help in Help Viewer.
Again, this has zero probability for the Mac Help "home page" itself — it's on the Mac — and for the list of help books as in both cases those resources are local. You can get a blank window if your Mac Help help book is missing or corrupted, per my FAQ, but again that doesn't involve the Internet: that's a probelm with the Mac itself.
If it happens again, I'd recommend checking Console for additional clues. Help Viewer depends heavily on caching and that's always seemed to be its weak link. It's gotten better, but it's still an application with issues. Quite a few changes have been made to Help Viewer's architecture in both Panther and Tiger to take the Internet-related issues that occurred in Jaguar out of the equation.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X -
When I open Help from the Help menu, that window stays on top no matter what other other windows I click or even when I ctrl tab or ctrl `. It is very inconvenient to constantly have to drag it around and out of the way while I am learning the layout and features of the main window. It also doesn't help that Mainstage won't let me resize the main window and it's pane's the way I want so I can get at everything with out having to always drag sliders back and forth.
On the first point (the help window) I would just minimize it (click the yellow button) when you don't need it and then just click it again in the dock when you want it back.
As for the resize main window, try clicking the square box beneath the slider - it's a quick way of zooming in and out instead of using the slider every time.
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I am trying to polish an application, and find that I cannot seem to reliably control which of the label or caption text appears in the context help window because I don't understand what rules are in place to determine which should appear. It seems like if I reate a named constant, then use it's right click menu command "Create Indicator" I get a control with only a Label (as long as I don't add a caption). This then appears in the context help window as the label name followed by the description text (after entering some description text). But if I add a caption, the label name is shown in bracket
s which is a 'feature' I would like to avoid, because I have certain controls where I would like to use a descriptive variable name on the block diagram side without using so much space on the front panel. It seems like there is no way to avoid showing the Label name in the context help for a control/indicator. Is this true?
I thought the purpose of having a seperate caption was to make the text that appears with a control programmatically controllable, but if that control is not extended to what appears in the context help window, it limits the usefulness of the caption and forces me to re-consider some Label names. However, the problem goes deeper than that because then even when I make the label and caption exactly the same, or if I delete (via a select caption text-backspace or select caption text- delete key .. sequence) the caption for a control, the label name in the context help window still appears in square brackets!
Can I have complete control over the context help fo
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I have used LabVIEW for three years, and I am now using LabVIEW 7.0.Sorry for that.. I was changing the text of my question and didn't read carefully enough in the preview stage. I wanted it to read "What determines whether the Label name and/or Caption appears in the context help window?"
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How do you stop the help window from floating to the top?
Is there way to change the help window's behavior so that it acts like a normal window?
It takes so long to set up seeing the problem and the help at the same time, then go back to reading and then back again.
The floating to the top is a very unwellcome "Feature" and microsoft-like not Apple-like.hmslfi wrote:
The floating to the top is a very unwellcome "Feature" and microsoft-like not Apple-like.
That depends on your POV. Some may prefer the default behaviour, because it doesn't allow the help window to be hidden by the working window.
Also, keep in mind that you can use the Minimise (yellow) button in the window's title bar.
However, if you really want to change the default floating window, there is a preference you can change with the defaults command:
$ defaults write com.apple.helpviewer NormalWindow -bool true
Alternatively, you can enable Help Viewer's developer mode
$ defaults write com.apple.helpviewer DevMode -bool true
(See
<http://www.macworld.com/article/158482/2011/03/hidehelpviewer.html>
for details.)
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