Many of the users of the projects I work on fall into the baby boomer category, and a lot of those use a computer because it’s necessary to get their jobs done. An extra step like installing something in order to view help will discourage people further from viewing help. They aren’t going to intuitively understand that it’s a one-time, easy-as-pie installation. And it would be difficult to get the word out to people using our systems (or who will use them in the future) that they have to install AIR just once.

On the Adobe Labs site, AIR is compared to Flash Player. My suggestion is that Adobe could talk to Microsoft and other companies about shipping AIR with their operating systems like they do Flash Player. Then people won’t have to worry about an extra installation.

I have some questions that perhaps you could clear up for me:

1. When will CSH be included? This is a deal-breaker for me because half the help systems I do are context-sensitive. And if I’m going to go with AIR help, I want to use it for all my projects, not half.

2. From what I’ve read, it’s not clear to me whether the AIR-packaged help is installed on or saved to a user’s hard drive. The description of the auto-update feature talks about going out to a central location and getting updates. What happens if your help system goes with a Web application and doesn’t need to be installed on users’ machines like a CHM is? Is it enough to have the AIR help file stored on a server only? Could the version on the server be configured to access a computer for updates?

3. In order to share comments, do reviewers have to email them? Are comments not saved as part of the AIR help so that I could open up my production help system and see people’s comments?

I hope you can answer here for reference of any readers wondering about RH Packager. If not, I’ll try the forum on the Labs. Thanks!