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SCHEMA Presents Free Help Reader Based on Adobe AIR
SCHEMA Help Reader is now part of the Nero product range.
Nürnberg. At the annual tekom conference in Wiesbaden, SCHEMA GmbH (hall 1, booth 114) will present for the first time their new SCHEMA Help Reader. It was developed together with Nero AG, a leading company in the development of Liquid Media technologies. Nero will be using the SCHEMA Help Reader for their own product documentation, which means the SCHEMA Help Reader will be installed on up to 50 million computers each year. Since the specifications are public, content will be easy to generate. The SCHEMA Help Reader will be available free in the first quarter of 2010 and downloadable from SCHEMA's website (www.schema.de).
The technology underlying the SCHEMA Help Reader is Adobe's AIR© platform, a development environment for web-based desktop applications. AIR© represents an ideal platform for help systems. Applications based on it are easy to install and update. In addition, AIR© is in wide use and available for all major operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
With this new development, SCHEMA and Nero are addressing the fact that Microsoft no longer actively supports HTML Help, the present standard in this area. Under Windows Vista or Windows 7 HTML Help files are not easy to generate any more. An additional advantage of SCHEMA Help Reader, in contrast to HTML Help, is its complete support for unicode, allowing help texts to be created in all languages.
The new features can be used with the editing and content management solution SCHEMA ST4. In future versions, a direct export to the SCHEMA Help Reader format will be available. Editors will not only be able to assemble modular content into marketing material, technical documentation or product catalogs, but also use this content for creating online help used in desktop or web applications. Information already stored as XML with SCHEMA ST4 will thus be available as valuable, integrated help for user problems.
SCHEMA Help Reader features comprehensive search possibilities and makes it easy to find content. Elements familiar from Web 2.0 provide clarity: tag clouds show particularly relevant phrases, and the user can add individual comments to entries of special interest. Bookmarks can also be added to content. Furthermore, the user can define keyboard shortcuts for a function or entry.
In order to illustrate help topics, editors can integrate multimedia content (e.g. videos) and add suggested solutions and explanations published on the Internet. When needed, SCHEMA Help Reader can link content and terminology to online services, making it possible, for example, to access relevant entries from Wikipedia or start a web search directly from the help content. RSS feeds can be displayed next to the entries. The online help can be linked to web blogs, allowing, for example, users to communicate with other users in the worldwide web who have solved similar problems. And of course it is possible to update the content in the Help Reader over the Internet.
Apart from the Web 2.0 elements, SCHEMA Help Reader offers the classic navigation options such as tree and breadcrumb navigation. The user interface is modern and clearly structured, allowing individual users to adjust it to their needs.
As Stefan Freisler, CEO of SCHEMA, explains, "the SCHEMA Help Reader closes a gap in the market that appeared when Microsoft withdrew from this area."