Thoughts on things

The help windows on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard are not at all very popular. All help windows are always on top, and the Help Viewer application itself has been made into a faceless background application. But thankfully, the help system can be made to work much like it did on Tiger.

MacWorld had a great tip today on how to put 10.5’s help windows in the background. This is a great start, and removes much of the annoyance. But the Help Viewer application is still invisible in the dock and when command-tabbing. This is however quite easy to fix.

Disclaimer: If this guide messes up your computer, I am definitely not to blaim. Proceed at your own peril.

1. Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices and locate Help Viewer.app
2. Right click (or control-click) and select View contents of package
3. Go into the folder Contents and locate the file Info.plist
4. Change the preferences of the file, so you have write access
5. What you do in this step varies according to whether or not you have Apples Developer tools installed.

   If you have Developer Tools installed:

   Open Info.plist in Property List Editor and remove the checkbox next to “Application is agent (UIELement)”

   If you don’t have developer tools:

   Open Info.plist in a text editor, and replace

   <key>LSUIElement</key>
   <true/>
   

   with

   <key>LSUIElement</key>
   <false/>
   

That’s it. Bob should, pretty much, be your uncle. It’s not quite perfect; command+q doesn’t work and you get a new help-window every time you click the icon in the dock, but it’s still way better than it was.