Hello,
It’s a great day for Telerik online help today. It was back in 2004 when we first published the online version of RadControls manuals. Since then we are always keeping the most current version of the documentation online. Naturally, as RadControls evolve in features and new suites one could expect the documentation improvements to follow them. Here I don’t mean the corrections and additions that we do on a daily basis, but rather a real revolution in the online help. That’s what we did today when we launched the first version of our Help Application.
As you might have expected, we are using Telerik RadControls and latest .NET Framework 3.5. In the new application, you will find:
- Frames replaced by resizable panes
We’re finally out of the 90s. The previous help version used frames to display the navigation and topic content and killed the search bots.
Tip: Double-click the splitter to show/hide the navigation tree.
- Auto-locate of the current topic
Very handy feature if you click on a help link given in a forum post - the new Help application will automatically expand the navigation tree and focus the currently opened topic.
- Load-on-demand for the navigation tree
Children nodes are loaded only when you expand the parent, which speeds up the application to 3rd space gear.
- Better search
The search will work in the scope of the help files by using Google-based search engine. This will give you more concrete results to your queries.
Note: It might take a day to have all help files indexed by the search engine, so please be patient, it is worth it!
I should say here that this is the initial version of the app. We have plans for adding more improvements and optimizations in the near future. I’ll keep blogging on that.
Needless to say that we made the application for you and since it is now live, we would be very glad to hear your thoughts.
You can see what I am talking about by following this link and viewing the online help of your favorite product.