This is the forth article in a series on the new Coastal Explorer 2010. If you are just joining us, be sure to read the first article first!

Part of the new Coastal Explorer 2010 design philosophy involves consolidation of related information and one place that is really noticeable is the new Help menu replacement.

The entire Help menu has been replaced with a new Help and Support window which can be accessed from the Main Menu. The Help and Support Window provides access to the documentation, links to the Coastal Explorer Network, Sending Feedback, and sending e-mail to Rose Point’s support department. It also contains information about your software license, a way to activate the software or an add-on, and version information.

Coastal Explorer 2010 also includes a brand new help viewer that was built from scratch by Rose Point to replace the standard Windows help viewer that has caused us many problems… While this new help viewer doesn’t help you plan or navigate a route directly, we hope that it will help more users take better advantage of the features that do!

While it is still a hyper-text system where you get around by clicking on links, we have simplified the user interface a bit and improved searching a great deal. A search box is always available on the toolbar (so you don’t need to expand the help window to include the sidebar and the switch the search tab). As you type into the search box, the rest of the window will show the topics that match what you’ve typed so far (see below for a screen shot).

The search results not only link to the topics, but also show a small bit of the text around the found text which will help you get to the right topic without needing to click on each one. Other improvements to the viewer include:

• The text size is adjustable between 8pt and 12pt for the normal text.
• The viewer colors get adjusted for dusk and night viewing.
• We can provide updates one topic at a time rather than needing to provide an entirely new help file. This will make program update downloads much smaller than they have been in the past.
• The content is MUCH easier for us to update so we should be much better at keeping it up to date as changes are made via updates, and we can start including a lot more information in the help system.