Apple Inc.

HelpHook

This is a very simple example of integrating a J2SE application with the Apple Help Viewer application. This sample code has been updated to include a project that produces a universal binary. No code changes were required for it to run correctly on Intel-based Macintosh computers.

Apple Publications Style Guide

The Apple Publications Style Guide provides editorial guidelines for text in Apple instructional publications, technical documentation, reference information, training programs, and the software user interface.

Delivering Content with RSS for Web Developers

The delivery of web content is being revolutionized by a new technique known as syndication. The most common format for syndication is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format for coordinating the delivery of time-based content streams, or 'feeds.' This means that RSS can be used to deliver content that changes over time. RSS provides for the inclusion of additional data, similar to email attachments, using the ENCLOSURE tag.

HTML Scripting Guide for QuickTime

You can use QuickTime and HTML together to present various kinds of multimedia over the Internet or from a local disk. There are specific HTML tags and parameters that cause a browser to load QuickTime and allow the HTML author to control QuickTime's behavior.

Introduction to Apple Human Interface Guidelines

These guidelines are designed to assist you in developing products that provide Mac OS X users with a consistent visual and behavioral experience across applications and the operating system.

Safari FAQ for Web Developers

Most developers are happy to follow the W3C guidelines and have their pages 'just work,' with no need for browser-specific HTML. Safari has the features you'd expect of a modern browser plus a few unique ones; understanding these, as well as a few Safari development tricks, will ensure your pages work exactly the way you and your users expect.

Typographical Features of the Cocoa Text System

It is common, especially in technical writing, to mix languages with differing text direction, such as English and Hebrew, in the same line. Some writing systems even alternate layout direction in every other line (an arrangement called boustrophedonic writing). Some languages do not group glyphs into words separated by spaces. Moreover, some applications call for arbitrary arrangements of glyphs; a graphic layout may require glyphs to be arranged on a nonlinear path.

Universal Access: Computers That Everyone Can Use

Apple has been working hard on Universal Access and it's time for you, the developer, to incorporate Universal Access into your application if you haven't done so already. This article guides you through the reasons you will want to provide Universal Access, the architecture underlying the technology, and how to get started incorporating these features into your application.

Accessibility

Since the discourse over creating accessible Web pages began, the standards organizations that helped inform the new Federal rules have stressed the separation of design and content. If the Internet is to reach its full potential, content will need to be authored so that it can be rendered by a broad array of devices: browsers, assistive technologies, PDAs, and devices that have yet to be imagined. Only by separating content from design will this be possible. By following the rules in Section 508, you will be doing more than providing access for those with disabilities; you will be creating content that is available to all users, no matter what devices are used to read it.

Cross Browser Animation

Dynamic HTML (DHTML) provides a new range of ways to animate a page. DHTML can animate both text and images and animations can move throughout the browser window, instead of being anchored in one spot. Unfortunately, DHTML can be tricky because of differences between browsers. This article will cover the basics of cross-browser animation. You’ll learn how to animate text and images. Plus you’ll see how to move HTML elements around the screen. After you’ve finished reading this article, you should be able to add cross-browser compatible DHTML animations to your web pages.

Dynamic Content with DOM-2 (Part I)

The relatively recent emergence of peer-to-peer distributed computing and the renewed interest in real-time data exchange have stoked the embers of a hot topic: displaying dynamic content over the Web. Unfortunately, the statelessness of HTTP and the limitations of the rendering components of different browsers present significant challenges to web developers wishing to get fresh information to the client without sending additional requests to a server.

Dynamic Content with DOM-2 (Part II)

This article dives into the JavaScript node interface and examines the different ways of altering the visible properties of an element or text node. You’ll first learn how to alter element attributes with DOM element methods, then you’ll see how to change an element’s style properties through the DOM Level 2 (DOM2) Style specification interface.

Dynamic Forms with DHTML

This approach uses Dynamic HTML (DHTML), which has several benefits over using IFRAMES to make life a bit easier for the users of your site. First, DHTML allows for more flexible formatting than IFRAMEs permit. You can apply background images, borders, fonts, and all the other features you’ve learned to expect from HTML and Cascading Style Sheets to DHTML objects. In contrast, IFRAMES have almost no configurable features. Second, if someone fills out one form, switches to another, then switches back, there’s a good chance that the browser will lose the information that was initially entered. This problem doesn’t exist in the DHTML solution. Third, with DHTML you can do tricky things like clipping and moving the form around the page. You could do these things by combining IFRAMES and DHTML, but you might as well just use DHTML in the first place.

Dynamic HTML and XML: The XMLHttpRequest Object

As deployment of XML data and web services becomes more widespread, you may occasionally find it convenient to connect an HTML presentation directly to XML data for interim updates without reloading the page. Thanks to the little-known XMLHttpRequest object, an increasing range of web clients can retrieve and submit XML data directly, all in the background. To convert retrieved XML data into renderable HTML content, rely on the client-side Document Object Model (DOM) to read the XML document node tree and compose HTML elements that the user sees.

Fonts

The ability to customize fonts— in Mac OS, in word processing documents, in Web pages— is really nothing new. However, when it comes to changing fonts on Web pages, the mechanism is decidedly less intuitive and certainly less than easy. Having to litter a Web page with FONT FACE tags makes for larger files, and larger headaches as you weed through these tags to find that one misspelled word. CSS makes the process of selecting a font easy, and even better, it provides a fallback mechanism for those times when users don'’t have the fonts you wanted to appear.

Form Validation

Any sort of interactive site is going to have form inputs — a place where your users input who they are, what they want to buy, where they live, and so forth. This data is passed to whatever handles your back end — a Perl CGI script, a PHP engine, a database like Oracle, or some other technology you’ve invested in. Whatever system is back there, you can bet that it doesn’t appreciate having its time wasted with bogus information, and chances are the user doesn’t appreciate it either. If the data the user submits to the CGI contains an error, there will be a noticeable lag — typically several seconds — before the information travels over the Internet to the server, is examined on the server, and then returns to the user along with an irritating error message. If you run a little preliminary validation of the user’s form input before the form is submitted, there will be no wait time. Client-side validation is instantaneous because it doesn’t have to transmit any data. JavaScript catches any erroneous data the user enters before it goes anywhere.

Hide/Show Layer

This script uses dynamic HTML (DHTML) to pop open a box with info in it when you click on a link. In my demo I’ve used this to pop up contextual help about filling in a form. It could also be used, for example, to give pop-up definitions for terms in an article. In both cases, it makes sense to give the information in context, modelessly. Likewise, this solution avoids the problems of statelessness and latency.

Horizontal Sizing in CSS

This article covers horizontal sizing and shows how to determine the width of elements with CSS. Once you’ve mastered both height and width, you should be well on your way to effectively using CSS.

Modifying Styles

With the release of W3 compliant browsers however, we now have the ability to change styles on the fly from JavaScript, using the W3C DOM. Unfortunately, due to a distinction between the way that embedded and remote stylesheet properties are exposed as opposed to the way that inline STYLE properties are exposed, this can be tricky.

Object Detection

The pace of new browser releases may be slower than it was in the early days, but developers must still confront a bemusing array of browser versions and brands that support some JavaScript features but not others. To combat the problem, scripters commonly provide two or more code branches so that a browser follows an execution path containing statements that it supports. Browser sniffing — the task of inspecting navigator object properties for version information — has become largely unmanageable given the browser version permutations available today. This article presents details on an alternative solution — object detection — that frees JavaScript developers from most of this versioning mess.

Plug-In Detection

Since there are clearly times when it makes sense to use a plug-in, the question arises of how to deal with those who don’t have the required plug-in installed. As Web developers, we have several choices. One option is to do nothing, simply serving the plug-in-dependent content. The trouble is that those that don’t have the required plug-in will get a rather disturbing page with a broken plug-in icon where your beautiful multimedia should be. Another option is to give visitors a choice between the plug-in version and the static HTML version of each page. Sometimes this may be the best choice, since it gives your visitors control over their experience. There are two problems, however. First of all, the choice itself interrupts a visitor’s experience of the site. Second, it requires them to know what plug-ins they have installed. But why should they need to know? Many users don’t know a plug-in from a spark plug? The final and often best option, the one this script is designed to help with, is to check to see if each visitor has a given plug-in. If they do, you can go ahead and serve them the page with the plug-in embedded.

Remote Scripting with IFRAME

As web sites become more and more like traditional applications, the call-response-reload model used in HTTP transactions becomes increasingly cumbersome. Instead of delivering a single dynamic page, the DHTML or JavaScript developer must create a series of separate pages. The flow of the application is interrupted by page reloads whenever the client communicates with the server. Remote scripting provides a solution to this problem, easing development of complex JavaScript applications, and providing a better experience for the end user.

Supporting Three Event Models at Once

Events make the client-side JavaScript world go ‘round. After a Web page loads, the only way a script can run is in response to a system or user action. While simple events have been part of the JavaScript vocabulary since the first scriptable browsers, more recent browsers implement robust event models that allow scripts to process events more intelligently. The problem, however, is that in order to support a wide range of browsers you must contend with multiple advanced event models. Three, to be exact.

Using SOAP with PHP

SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol, is the powerhouse of web services. It's a highly adaptable, object-oriented protocol that exists in over 80 implementations on every popular platform, including AppleScript, JavaScript, and Cocoa. It provides a flexible communication layer between applications, regardless of platform and location. As long as they both speak SOAP, a PHP-based web application can ask a C++ database application on another continent to look up the price of a book and have the answer right away.

Vertical Sizing in CSS

This article covers vertical sizing and shows how to determine the height of elements with CSS. Once you’ve mastered both height and width, you should be well on your way to effectively using CSS.

Web Page Development: Best Practices

This article gives some practical hints on how to create standards-conforming websites, and to work around some of issues that will arise for Explorer for Windows. Before you start coding your website you must make a few decisions—which DOCTYPE do you use? Do you use pure CSS, or CSS with Minimal Tables? We'll discuss these topics, and then go into some design guidelines and issues to consider with XHTML and CSS.

WebObjects

WebObjects is Apple's suite of tools and object-oriented frameworks for creating and deploying scalable, reusable web and Java applications for the Internet and intranets. WebObjects supports the development, deployment, and extension of standards-based web services without the need to write low-level SOAP, XML or WSDL code. Tools enable code-free generation, configuration, and testing of web services from existing data assets.

XML Transformations with CSS and DOM

Mozilla permits XML to be rendered in the browser with CSS, and manipulated with the DOM. This is a real boon to those of us eager to experiment with XML transformations (both visual and structural) without having to delve into unfamiliar technologies such as XPath, the verbose traversal language of XSLT. If you’re already familiar with CSS and DOM, you’re more than halfway to achieving XML transformations in Mozilla.

Apple Human Interface Guidelines

These guidelines are designed to assist you in developing products that provide Mac OS X users with a consistent visual and behavioral experience across applications and the operating system.

User Experience

This document outlines typical areas of concern when porting a Microsoft Windows application to Mac OS X, and provides guidance for transitioning to the Mac OS X UI.

Apple Publications Style Guide (2003)

The May 2003 edition of the standard reference for Apple publications.

Human Interface Design Principles

This section provides a theoretical base for the wealth of practical information on implementing the Aqua interface elements presented in the rest of this book. You’ll undoubtedly find that you can’t design in accordance with all of the principles all the time. In those situations, you’ll have to make decisions based on which principle or set of principles is most important in the context of the task you’re solving. User testing is often an excellent way to decide between conflicting principles in a particular context.

Macintosh OS X: Aqua Human Interface Guidelines

This document, which covers features up to Mac OS X version 10.2, describes what you need to do to design your application for Aqua. Primarily intended for Carbon and Cocoa developers who want their applications to look right and behave correctly in Mac OS X, these guidelines provide examples of how to use Aqua interface elements. Java application developers will also find these guidelines useful.

International Technologies

International technologies describes a collection of Macintosh technologies and resources developers can use to internationalize or localize their applications. Internationalization is the process of readying your software to handle different text systems and locale-specific features. Localization is the process of translating an application's text elements, and adjusting the user interface for a specific language or region.

Online Documentation and Online Help

A bibliography that presents major works on topics discussed in the book Inside Macintosh: Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines.

Strategies for Producing Browser-Based Technical Documentation

This Technical Note attempts to provide a few good strategies for resolving some of the issues around producing and viewing Web-based technical documentation. The Note may be useful for engineers, technical writers and content producers who must wrestle with issues of producing documents such as ReadMe files, Release Notes, technical articles, and other forms of technical communication that land on the Web.

Mac OS Help

Online help facilities are an important part of any software product in today's marketplace. Apple has a number of technologies specifically designed for providing both convenient to use and easy to understand online help. Interested developers can take advantage of these technologies and use them to build online help facilities into their own products. This page provides an overview of the current Apple help technologies along with links to other related resources.

Macintosh OS 8 Human Interface Guidelines

This document describes the additions and changes to Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines related to the release of Mac OS 8. Specifically, it presents guidelines for taking advantage of the Mac OS platinum appearance and the Appearance Manager. This document does not replace Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines.

Apple Publications Style Guide (2003)

An updated version of the style guide used by writers and editors in Apple publications groups.

Apple Guide Complete: Designing and Developing Onscreen Assistance

If you've been waiting to give your users more than just onscreen reference information, now you can with Apple Guide, Apple Computer's innovative help delivery system. With Apple Guide, you can produce guide files that actually lead users, step by step, through complex tasks and concepts. If you want to provide task-oriented, context-specific instructions, Apple Guide gives you the ease and flexibility to do so. You'll learn about the complete cycle of designing, scripting, and coding guide files in the four parts of this book.