Help in a drawer

[Frank Dissinger <frank -dot- dissinger -at- cgs-oris -dot- com>]

Hi all,

Perhaps this is the wrong place for asking my question. If so, could 
someone point me to a more appropriate group?

I'd like to improve the accessibility of our help system by embedding it 
into our Windows XP/Vista applications.
I imagine a context-sensitive help which automatically appears in a kind 
of "drawer" and shows the help text for the dialog element that has the 
focus. The drawer appears to the right of the dialog or window and can 
be made wider and narrower, or closed completely.
I have uploaded three illustrations to our FTP server: 
ftp://oris:oris -at- ftp -dot- oris -dot- info/pub/FD/

My questions are the following:

    * Has anybody seen Windows applications with this kind of "drawer
      help"? (I know there must be something similar on Mac OS).
    * Does anyone have implementation hints or sample code (C++) for our
      programmers? They say this kind of thing is difficult to
      implement, so my suggestion has been assigned a very low priority.

Thank you in advance.
Regards, Frank
 

Frank Dissinger  ·  /Technical Writer/

CGS Publishing Technologies International GmbH
Kettelerstr. 24  ·  63512 Hainburg  ·  Germany

info -at- cgs -dot- de  ·  http://www.cgs-oris.com

Phone: +49 (0) 6182 9626 0
Fax: +49 (0) 6182 9626 99

Commercial register: Offenbach, HRB no. 21495
Managing directors: Trevor Haworth, Jan de Maeyer, Andreas Kämmerer

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