A

Anonymous

Question

Air concerns, please clarify

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
November 24, 2011
3 replies
5522 views

Hi everybody,

I like very much the outlook and the speed of an AirHelp, however there are some concerns in my company regarding this type of help, and it would be awesome if I would get those dissipated.

First, there is the concern about the help trying to access the Internet. We have a lot of customers, who due to their security setting in their company do not have access to the Internet. Therefore, my question would be: is it possible to use the AirHelp locally (on a local workstation or on a server), somehow similar to the chm files?

Second, there is a concern about the size. Is it possible to generate a single file that can be opened somehow the same way as we do with a chm file or a documentation file? At some point as I was testing the AirHelp, I found out that in order to be able to view it, one has to download Air from Adobe. Is it possible to distribute the Air, or they just have to download the Air themselves from the Adobe web site, the same way it is done with Acrobat Reader?

Thank you very much

This topic has been closed for replies.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Bogdan

It looks like your questions have been answered by Jeff and Mohit (welcome to the forum).

As Jeff has said, the installation can be made transparent to the customer who need never know about the number of files that get installed by the AIR file. Even if they do, what's the issue? This was a concern that everyone jumped up and down about when AIR help was first launched but no one seems to have found it a real issue. A storm in a teacup.

That said, if you don't also distribute the runtime and include that and the AIR help in your installer, you are making it more difficult for your customer and I think they would then be justified in complaining.

Word or PDF as forms of help are nowadays pretty dated.

Browser Based AIR help does not have all the features of the locally installed version. See my site on that.

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

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A

Anonymous

Hi Peter,

I understand that the PDF is pretty much outdated, however I understood that there are still customers who prefer to print physically the documentation and read it or just read it as a PDF document.

A PDF is also very portable and does not take too much space. Also, it is very fast through its TOC when it comes to accessing different topics.

From what I saw till now, and I must admit that I did not see to much yet, as I could not experiment too much due to time issues, from the AIR help is that it looks much nicer then the PDF and the chm. It is also very fast.

However, right now, these are not too much as arguments in favour of keeping the RoboHelp as authoring tool in our company, and I was looking for more interesting features that AIR might offer in comparison to other solutions.

So, to reiterate again the main points that are of importance to us right now for a help solution would be:

- size that it will take in the setup file: due to distribution

- it has to be standalone and installable/accessible on the network

- something else which would make it stand out compared to the PDF that we are employing for the time being

If I could get something definitely superior to just PDF from the points of view above, then I would be able to keep RoboHelp in our company.

Mo_Arora-xkWzcj

Adobe Employee

I already downloaded the trial, and "played" a little bit with it, however it was only connected to the issue with the printed documentation (a different discussion in the Printed documentation forum), and because, from that point of view, it was a total flop, I did not get too much of feeling about it.

Also, right now, unfortunately, I do not have the luxury of experimenting. I am caught with a very important project that also have to translate into French, German, Japanese & Spansih, so I was hoping that perhaps I could get from the most experienced ones some arguments in favour of keeping and upgrading the RoboHelp.

I was saying in another discussion that my immediate boss already started converting the other smaller projects in Word, and getting rid of the RoboHelp, so I have this last one project that I manage which because of the use of conditional flags, is a little bit complicated to keep in Word. My upper boss already gave the OK to just keep this only project with RoboHelp until we could make an internal solution in Word that would deal with conditional flags.

Therefore, I was hoping that I could show something which would make RoboHelp stand out in ease of use as well as interesting features (I was looking for AIR to replace the chm) and make RoboHelp remain and upgrade, at least with this only last project.

Couple of worthy features (with AIR output) I can think of are:

1. You get a nice professional looking help. The look and feel of the help is customizable and looks same on all the platforms . So it also gives you a cross-platform edge.

2. You get the Commenting and Topic Rating features.

3. And you can manage the Help updation. When your clients open the Help and there is a newer version available they get to download the same. Further, you can also have some selective set of customers upgrade to the newer version (using the Help ID) only if they are entitled too. The other set of customers can remain at the older version.

~Mohit Arora

Mo_Arora-xkWzcj

Adobe Employee

Using AIR as your primary output, you can either choose to output your help file as

i) AIR Application File

ii) Browser Based help

AIR Application file would install like any other application on your machine and this would not require any internet connection. However, as you pointed out in your second question, this would require you (or the users you are trying to distribute to) to have AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) downloaded from Adobe’s website in order to view the help file. The Runtime setup is not as big as Adobe Reader and should not take much of space.

Browser Based help too can be used to view the help offline. The output in this case would be a bunch of files, the starting point of which would be index.html. This html file would load a Flex based output (SWF file) and you would need Flash Player in your web browser to view the help file.

Hope this information helps.

~Mohit Arora

A

Anonymous

Hi Mohit Arora,

Thank you for your answer.

For us would be interesting, from the distribution point of view, the AIR Application File, however hearing that it also generates a bunch of files, I do not know how convenient would be for the customer in comparison to a simple PDF file that is conveying the same information.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Yes, there is a locally-installed flavour of AIRHelp - the file is a .air file that gets installed on the workstation. Size can be a problem because the single .air file gets unpacked into (basically) a full WebHelp installation on the workstation. The .air file you create in RH is installed using the free AIR runtime. You can apply to Adobe for a license to re-distribute and package it with your own custom installer (that's the way my company does it with our .NET product).

See Peter Grainge's site for more info on AIRHelp - http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/air/air.htm

A

Anonymous

Hi Jeff,

Thank you very much for your info, however getting a bunch of files would be a little bit cumbersome for the client, so the PDF file looks more appealing.

Applying for a license would not be a problem, though I do not think we would distribute Air. We could give a suggestion to download it from the Adobe web site.

I will check also Peter's web site regarding more details about Air.

I am just looking for something that could replace in an honorable way the chm, and to be more appealing than the PDF.

I also would like to continue using RoboHelp, therefore to be able to offer some arguments in favour of it to my higher-ups not to give it up.

Right now we are only generating PDF with RoboHelp.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Client never notices that's there's a pile of files - it just launches the main AIRHelp viewer from the shortcut or from within your program.

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