Step 6: Add Help Buttons to Alerts, Dialogs, and Panels

Most applications include a help button in alerts, dialogs, and panels if they aren’t self-explanatory. The help button is a little circle surrounding a question mark. If you design a custom panel in Interface Builder, the Interface Builder Library supplies the help button. The Print panel you implemented in Recipe 9 contains a help button by default in the lower-left corner. If you run Vermont Recipes, open the Chef’s Diary, choose File > Print, and then expand the Print panel, you will see it. Click it, and you are immediately taken to Mac Help’s Print dialog help page. A help button in an alert, dialog, or panel is a great convenience for the user, because it obviates the need to think up a search term or browse through the help book.

In this step, you first make the help button in the Print panel take you to a custom Vermont Recipes printing topic page instead of to the Mac Help Print dialog page. Then you implement help buttons in some of the alerts in the application.