David Pogue at Macworld 2008: Leopard's new help program

By David Pogue

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TRANSCRIPT

The new help program is a blessing and a curse. The curse of it is that the help window now appears on top of all other windows and cannot be sent to the back. It’s extremely annoying. Here I am in Microsoft Word trying to learn why things aren’t working right and the help window appears in front of the program and cannot be sent to the back. A little annoying. I asked Apple about this and the reason they said was that they had so many calls from newbies who would choose help and were unaware that the help window was on the screen. It would appear behind the other programs and they couldn’t find it or read it and so they would call Apple and we all know that’s a no-no.

So the help window always appears in front, you cannot send it to the back, so my recommendation is to make it tall and skinny and move it off to the side so you can still see what you’re doing. The best part of all is that help now has its own private spotlight. It has its own search command that searches through all the help without your even having to get into help to begin with, so very, very cool. Let’s search for printing and there we go right there. I can jump directly to that without any other intervening screens, but the really cool thing is the fact that help now searches menus. So in some programs like your web browser or anything with the word “Microsoft” in it there are hundreds of thousands of menu commands.

Like I know there’s page numbering in there somewhere or I know one of those 300 history things is in there. How do you find it? Well you type the thing you want into the search box. Notice down at the bottom is the regular help page but the blue ones at the top are identifying menu commands with that word in them, “print”, and if you point to it watch what happens. What the hell is that? That thing freaked me out the first time. I thought oh, another bug. It’s not a bug. It’s an arrow saying “I found this for you in one of the menus and here it is”, on the premise that a lot of times what you’re looking for is like, how do I print? How do I set the margins? How do I get page numbers? So now it’ll search through the menus.

This is especially valuable in Safari because you know what? Your history list is a menu. So I’ve been tracking this appalling Gizmodo thing. At CES, the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas last week, bloggers for the first time were given full credentials as press. They were allowed in, given free passes, given snacks and places to sit and a WiFi network to use, so CES finally treated them as first class citizens. So what does Gizmodo.com do? They get one of those TV Be Gone devices, which is used in bars and restaurants when the TV is blaring, you hit one button and it sends the off codes for every brand of television so you can secretly turn off any TV in a public place.

They ran around CES, 90% of which is TVs, turning off all the TVs and filming it, including I’m sorry to say, during press conferences and people’s demos. I thought that was very uncool. So I’ve been sort of tracking this and quietly weeping to myself that there are actually some people that keep saying, “Yeah! Stick it to the man!” It’s like obviously people who’ve never had a job, a wife or a child. They don’t know anything about what it’s like to be in the middle of a presentation and have you screen go off.

Anyway, so I’ve been sort of tracking this so if I type “Gizmodo” it’ll find all of the history items and show me them in my history menu no matter what day it was on, oh that’s the one, and I can just click it, open it, and go back to that page were I in fact on the Internet.