If you are already a Platform User Assistance developer, check out the Development Resources.

If you just need a high level description of the Eclipse User Assistance, please read the overview document.

The Platform User Assistance component provides the mechanisms for making the Eclipse applications easier to use. These mechanisms are made available throughout usage life cycle and include initial user experience (welcome), online documentation, dynamic help, search, cheat sheets, automation and samples.

The goal of this component is to make it easier for users to accomplish their tasks in Eclipse applications. While it includes the traditional book-based help system, increasing effort is spent towards bringing assistance closer to the user. Welcome, dynamic help view and cheat sheets are examples of user assistance vehicles that can be used that way.

The focus now is on exploring ways to make documentation contribution more dynamic. The experience of using XHTML to make initial user experience easier to author is now examined for online help documentation. Similar technique can be used to support content reuse and contribution. Federated search introduced in 3.1 is being enhanced to support pluggable indexing and search participants so that all UA vehicles can be indexed and searched at once.

For more detailed information, check out the Development Resources.

3.2 Development Effort - Milestone 2 (September 23 2005)

Key Dates

• R3.2 Milestone 2: September 23, 2005
• Last day of development: September 16,2005
• Build/test/fix pass: September 19, 2005

Development Highlights

• Investigating use of XHTML for dynamic help documentation (for content reuse, contribution and conditional filtering)
• Investigating more flexible alternatives to customization.ini for TOC ordering

If you are interested in participating in the development of the User Assistance component, check out the developer's mailing list: platform-help-dev@eclipse.org. Chat with people there about your problems and interests, and find out what you can do to help.

In particular, if you have experience programming the multiplicity of available HTML browsers, are interested in document search technologies, have worked with servlets and jsp's, would like to Eclipse-enable existing embedded browser controls, or are interested in evolving a tooling story targeted at Eclipse information developers, the User Assistance team would like to hear from you.

For more detailed information, check out the Development Resources.