| 11:43:31 AM PDT - Mon, Apr 30th 2012 |
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I commiserate with you on the state of the ECCE help system. ECCE hasn't been funded to provide a cohesive help system in many years. When we were, there were a couple of technical writers on the team who the developers worked with and it was quite nice. One bit of advice I'd give now is to not use the http://ecce.pnl.gov website (http://ecce.emsl.pnl.gov points to the same) when it comes to help on individual applications (the website is good for release notes and the movies we created demonstrating specific functionality). I'd stick to getting help from within ECCE itself realizing that even that is dated in many places.
The Organizer help was rewritten (as more of an overview rather than the previous detailed help) along with the Builder/Viewer and those are now "client-based" (file) help instead of via the web server even though it is displayed in a web browser. That's why the Organizer help on the ECCE website points to the old Calculation Manager application since we can't serve file based help from our web server (as you hypothesized). The Builder is the same although the name of the application wasn't changed in that case which potentially could lead to even more confusion. You have to use the applications themselves to see that help.
I just removed the online help links for the Organizer, Builder, and Viewer applications to hopefully be less misleading (no longer links to the old applications). Instead there are notes to see the help in the applications themselves. I left the other applications as they were, even though those too are out of date--just less so. When we converted from the old X Windows Motif toolkit GUIs to wxWidgets we did some enhancements to every application based on experience from our initial versions (and unfortunately also lost a minor feature here and there). But, the web-based help predates the wxWidgets conversion. The Organizer and Builder/Viewer got major redesigns and that's why they were the only ones to get an overview-level of new help.
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