The Omni Group

Hello! It's kind of strange to think that it's been over a year since I first posted Helpify. If you haven't met it, Helpify is a tool for Mac developers to generate Apple Help Books for their software. We use it here, of course, and it has seen a bit of popularity outside of Omni too.

Version 1.5 incorporates a lot of improvements that were suggested (or written!) by kind folks in the Mac community. This time around, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software was especially helpful in making sure our indexing process works equally well on Snow Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X.

And thanks to Automator, Helpify is now an applet, not just a command-line script. You can drop your source outline right on it. Other new niceties include variables stored inside the source outline instead of inside the script, and better handling of anchors that appear at the top of a page.

I hope you find this new version of Helpify useful. Please let us know what you think!

Update: Version 1.5.1 fixes a problem parsing the special Variables section. Thanks to John Alexander for pointing it out.

Update: Version 1.5.2 fixes a problem with setting up the Box style and with a bogus link to a Variables page on the last page. Thanks to Nicholas Riley.

Download Helpify 1.5.2