Reading Beyond The Lines

The Adobe Community Help experience with Creative Suite 6 has changed — it’s now more customized and smarter — connecting users with the most relevant content from Adobe and experts around the world.

Here are my top three reasons on why I think the new Adobe Community Help experience is more enriching than ever before.

Enhanced topic-browsing experience

 When you access Help from your product using F1 (on Windows) or the Help menu, a topic browsing page opens in your default web browser. The web page combines community contributions and Adobe content. For example, when you launch Photoshop Help, you are taken to the Photoshop topic browsing page, which looks like this:

What I really like about topic-browsing is that you browse through carefully chosen topic categories rather than structured books. In a book structure, I’d often get lost figuring out where a topic is, and would  browse through multi-layered TOCs to get to a topic. Not anymore! I can now get to my information in a glance. For example, if I need information about a lighting filter in Photoshop, I just click the “Filter and Effect” topic category, and select the article that I want to view.

To see more articles related to a particular topic, just click the More link. Additionally, Adobe continually curates and adds to the collections, so you will always find the latest and greatest articles. And the content that is displayed is curated across CS5, CS5.5, and CS6 releases.

 Your online Help experience is browser-based, so you can use your browser’s native functionality to search, bookmark, comment, or rate content.

Effective online-offline Help experience 

The Adobe Help manager is an AIR-based content installation utility that downloads offline help content and notifies you when new updates are available. The Help Manager will download HTML or PDF reference that can be viewed offline, either via your web browser or via Adobe Acrobat Reader (or similar PDF viewing software). 

You can access CS6 Help offline as a downloadable PDF and view the ActionScript Reference content offline via your web browser.
Important note: Offline help PDFs for CS6 will be available only in June 2012.

If no new content is available, the application will shut down until the next time you select Help.

Handy-dandy CS6 Help hub

Users can access online Help for all Creative Suite products from a single CS6 Help hub page. This page is your one-stop-shop for all self-help and tutorials for CS6. You can simply bookmark this page instead of a dozen or more individual product Help pages.

For more details on Adobe Community Help, see this article. And we’d be very interested to know your thoughts on the new Community Help experience for CS6!

…about Adobe’s vision for Community Help in the coming years?

…about what Help will mean and look like when we move from the desktop to the tablet to the cloud?

…about a shared social learning experience that can blur the boundaries between “inspiration & instruction” and “content & community”?

If you answered Yes to even one of the questions above, make sure that you book your seat at the Social Studies: Connecting Content and Community in the Cloud session at Adobe MAX 2011.

In this session, Luanne Seymour, Senior Instructional Designer at Adobe, and Jaydeep Dutta, Experience Design Manager at Adobe, take you through a fascinating journey of exploring three trends that are currently sweeping the digital world: tablets moving from content consumption to creation, increasingly pervasive social features, and everything shifting to the cloud. Learn more about how UX Design and Content & Community come together to take advantage of these three trends and envision a compelling Community Help experience for designers and developers.

For more information on the session, see http://bit.ly/p871i3.

Earlier, when you wanted to add comments to a Help topic or rate it, you needed to go to Help on the web. With the Community Help Client (CHC), you can comment on, rate, and contribute to Help content and Adobe online resources like Developer Center articles – all from within the CHC.

To provide feedback and rating through the CHC, search for the Help topic or Adobe online resource that you want to comment on, and click Feedback & Rating in the bottom left-corner of the CHC. The Feedback & Rating tab opens to let you post your feedback.

You, of course, need a valid Adobe ID to provide any feedback and rating. If you do not have an Adobe ID as yet, you can get one in a couple of minutes by registering yourself at: https://www.adobe.com/membership

What I really like about providing feedback through the CHC is that you can categorize your feedback in the form of a tip, correction, or suggest a link to a relevant online resource. Once you post your feedback, the feedback appears with the relevant icon denoting the feedback type.

Also, don’t miss the Have a question? link – this link takes you right to the Adobe Forums (http://forums.adobe.com/index.jspa), where you can discuss your questions with other Adobe users.

So, the next time you want to provide feedback on a Help topic, do try it out through the CHC!

The updated version of the Adobe Community Help Client (CHC) offers a basic yet very useful feature – the CTRL+F shortcut key to locate a word or phrase on a page displayed in the CHC.

Like CTRL+F would work in a web browser, in the CHC, too, you just need to press CTRL+F, type the word or phrase, and press ENTER. The CHC automatically searches and highlights the word or phrase that you are looking for.

So, while you would use the many search refinements to reach to the right Help resource, don’t forget that CTRL+F works, too!

I’m very excited to blog about the updated version of the Adobe Community Help Client (CHC) that is now available for download. The enhancements in this version of the CHC are search-centric and provide very effective search refinements.

The CHC is an AIR application, so you get any new content updates and feature enhancements without reinstalling the CHC. When you open the CHC, you’ll be prompted to download an updated version of the AIR application that has these search refinements. 

We now have two broad search categories – Online Help and Local Help

As the names suggest, these categories let you search across multiple online resources or within Help packages downloaded to your computer. Within each of these categories, you can further refine your search results to specific resources.

When you select online help, you can refine your search results by using these filter options:

• Adobe.com – Searches all Adobe online resources including Help pages, Developer Center articles, and knowledgebase articles.
   
• All - A comprehensive search that includes all the resources available on adobe.com as well as the most relevant content contributed by experts from the Adobe community.

• Adobe reference only – Searches all the online Adobe Help pages for the selected product. For example, if you select ColdFusion Builder as the product, you can search across ColdFusion and ColdFusion Builder documentation available on the web.

• You can also narrow your search down to specific Help resources for the product. For example, if you select ColdFusion Builder as the product, you can search across ColdFusion 9 documentation or within the Installing ColdFusion Builder or Using ColdFusion Builder documentation.

Our research suggests that online Adobe Help resources are searched the most, so you have a handy Adobe reference only check box right at the top of the search tab. When you select this check box, the Local Help option is automatically disabled allowing you to search only across online Adobe Help resources.

When you are offline, you can use the Local Help option to search within the Help packages downloaded to your desktop.

Searching for information is now easier and faster than ever before! Do send in your feedback, and let us know how effective you find the new search refinements. 

“Dynamic Navigation” or “In-Context Navigation” is one of my favorite features of the Adobe Community Help Client.

The Dynamic Navigation feature of the Community Help Client displays related topics based on the context of your search results.

For example, when you’re reading through a particular topic in the CFML Reference, you can quickly jump to related topics in the Developer Guide or on the web without doing a new search.

To check out this feature, follow these quick few steps.

1. In the Community Help Client, select ColdFusion 9 as the product.

2. Ensure that Community Help is selected as the search option.

3. Enter the search term “cfmap”, and press Enter.
   

4.  Select the first search result pointing to the CFML Reference.
   
   You will see a Related Content tab appear at the bottom left corner of the CHC offering you links like these:
   

Now try out dynamic navigation for other search terms: “cfspreadsheet”, “cfsearch 9″, “cfdocument”, “cfquery 9″, “cfpresentation 9″, “cfpdf 9″.

You can also try out this feature for a few ColdFusion Builder Help topics. Select “ColdFusion Builder” as the product, ensure that Community Help is the search option, and enter any of these search terms “debugging remote applications” or “code refactoring coldfusion builder”.

Couple of things to note:

• Ensure that you select an Adobe Help topic for the related content to appear. Dynamic navigation is implemented only for ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder Help topics. So, when you look-up a Help page for ColdFusion 8 or an earlier ColdFusion release, related content will not display.

• This is a work-in-progress feature, so you’ll not yet find related content for all Help topics. We are, however, working towards adding related content for many of the widely-searched Help topics.

We are keen on knowing your feedback. So, do let us know how dynamic navigation works for you!

I’ve been doing a series of blog posts on the Adobe Community Help Client (CHC) since it’s been really one of the highlights of the ColdFusion Builder Beta 3 release.

In this post, I’ll focus on the Community Help Client preferences – something that I’ve figured that many people have not yet explored. The CHC provides you with many preferences to control how the Help content is displayed.

Within the CHC, select Edit > Preferences, and you can set the following preferences, as required.

• You can select a light or dark theme for the CHC. For example, when you apply a dark theme, the CHC has a dark background and theme-specific fonts.

• The CHC is launched as an AIR application, by default. You can, however, choose to launch the CHC in your web browser by selecting Open Help In Browser.

• You can specify your download preferences by selecting the products and Help packages that you want to have available for offline use. If the downloaded Help packages are up-to-date, the status shows as “current”.

• CHC provides content updates and feature enhancements without reinstalling the AIR application. Select Notify Me When Updates Are Available to be prompted for new updates when you either open or close the CHC. You can also choose to manually search and install updates.

For more information on using the CHC configured with ColdFusion Builder, see ColdFusion Builder Help System in the ColdFusion Builder User Guide.

Search is key to the Adobe Community Help Client (CHC).  You can specify various search and filter options in the CHC and search across different Help packages and search locations.

Select Help > ColdFusion Builder Help to launch the Adobe Community Help Client. In the CHC, click Search Options to display the following Search locations:

Local Help – Use this option to search the Help packages downloaded to your desktop. Click Filter Results to narrow down your search results to a specific book in the Help package.

Note that you can search Local Help only if the downloaded Help packages are fully downloaded. A good way to check if the Help packages are downloaded is by going to Edit > Preferences > Local Content. The status for the ColdFusion Builder and ColdFusion docs should read as “Current”.

Adobe.com – Use this option to search for reference content across all online resources available on adobe.com, including Developer Center articles, tutorials, and knowledgebase articles.

Community Help – This search is cumulative of all the resources available on adobe.com as well as the most relevant content contributed by experts from the Adobe community.

Happy searching!

A new Help system – Adobe Community Help Client - has been introduced in the ColdFusion Builder Beta 3 release.

Community Help Client (CHC) is an AIR application that is configured with ColdFusion Builder to provide ColdFusion Builder and ColdFusion 9 Help content. The Help content is served directly from the web. So, when you open the CHC for the first time, an Internet connection is needed. You can then download the Help content to your desktop to use and search offline.

To launch the Adobe Community Help Client, within ColdFusion Builder, select Help > ColdFusion Builder Help.

Some of the key features of the Community Help Client are:

• Up-to-date definitive reference content online and offline
  
• Relevant content contributed by experts from the Adobe community
  
• Ability to comment on, rate, and contribute to content in the Adobe community
  
• Content updates and feature enhancements without reinstalling the AIR application

 To learn more about the Community Help Client, see http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/communityhelp/.

Some delectable news for all ColdFusion fans – especially, if you haven’t visited the Adobe Cookbooks page lately.

The Adobe Cookbooks application now has a dedicated ColdFusion Cookbook serving ColdFusion code recipes. And in less than two months, we’ve already crossed over a hundred recipes.

The ColdFusion Cookbook now makes it simple as ever to browse, view, and search for ColdFusion code recipes. If you don’t find a code recipe that you’re looking for, you can just request for that recipe. With the combined knowledge of the ColdFusion community and experts, it shouldn’t be long before the recipe you requested for is dished up.

To create or request a recipe, all you need is a valid Adobe ID. If you don’t have one, please take a few moments to register. To know additional details about the new Adobe Cookbooks application, read through this post in The ADC Blog.

So, here’s urging every ColdFusion developer out there to participate in this community application – be it by contributing, requesting, commenting, or rating the code recipes. As always, we greatly appreciate each and everyone’s participation!

Akbarsait pointed out that there’s another contest running to encourage cookbook contributions – and once a target of 200 contributions is reached, there’s going to be another drawing, with yet another chance to win more prizes! Details of the contest at Akbarsait’s blog: http://bit.ly/CFCBContest

So, what are you’ll waiting for?