08.30.06
View .chm in OS X
I haven’t been as vocal about this as Andrew (parts [1], [2], [3], [4]), but I too have joined the mac world with the use of a nice silver intel-based MacBook Pro replacing my desktop. Now many thoughts have been accumulated during the learning process :) but I guess I wanted have some “well-formed” ideas before posting (and so avoid showing a greater-than-necessary amount of ignorance!). But now I have to post on my fun with .chm viewers…
I have been happily using parallels to get back to the XP/Visual Studio world as needed, and rebooting with bootcamp when I need DirectX 3D acceleration. (I’m sooooo looking forward to a VM that can give me that without a reboot).
However, although I can do all the things I’ve wanted so far, I have been frustrated by the limits, such as not being able to browse to my bootcamp XP partition and just open a windows compiled help file (.chm). So today I started my search.
Here’s my list
My testing process is a bit of a blur, but some programs crashed… to be honest I didn’t care why, I just moved on. However, significantly for me, only xCHM correctly showed (buit?) an index/contents for the DirectX .chm files I wanted to read.
Having the contents/index to look at is essential. Not having it is like reading a book but you can’t turn the pages! Almost useless. I don’t know why the DirectX help files had indexes that didn’t show (I’m sure its something different about those files) but the bottom line is I needed to read those files with indexes and xchm did the job.
So, that’s my pick for the day. ymmv, but it was a good Google/test/win day for me.