The "speed" of Apple's help tool is a continuing source of wonder (and not in a good way!) for me. A simple search engine written entirely in Javascript would run MUCH faster, and yet Apple's help system makes use of precompiled indices. What the heck?
For example — if Cheetah 3D simply had a PDF instead of help and selecting help launched the PDF in Preview, searching would be ridiculously faster. (E.g. if I launch C3D and bring up help and search for "polycore" it takes a ridiculously long time (it even takes a while to bring up help in the first place). Meanwhile, loading up the PDF dump in Preview is instantaneous, and searching for polycore yields 14 results (with thumbnails!) in a fraction of a second.
Indeed, over the years, Apple's horrible help implementations seem to be one of its ongoing blind spots. Yes, a user shouldn't need to resort to them often, but surely they shouldn't suck so monumentally.
It would probably be relatively easy to add fast help search to C3D Buddy...
Edit: further investigation reveals lunr.js, which would make doing this fairly easy. (It does make pre-compiled indices possible, but the documentation isn't very helpful.) I do not know how Martin produces/maintains his help files. I think if he migrated it all to the web (e.g. using jekyll) and simply bottled the website for offline users (and loaded it in the default browser) it would be a big improvement. There's a lot of effort, from Apple and others, to make browsers fast and excellent. There seems to be zero effort at Apple to improve the Help system.
