Help documentation on 10.9 no longer works

[f54da]

Funny thing, clicking on "help" documentation for most system apps (e.g. textedit, syspreferences) no longer works. Clearly a bug on apple side since the actual help documentation is all online and still works for 10.8

https://help.apple.com/textedit/help/10.8/help/index.html?lang=en

but the 10.9 version fails with some javascript error. Trying to use the version of the JS framework from the 10.8 doesn't work. It's probably possible to muck around and get it working, but 10.9 and 10.8 are close enough.

You can get the url for help documentation from the info.plist of underlying help bundle btw. Maybe someone can write simbl plugin to automatically redirect 10.9 to 10.8 version. Or if you're already using some system-wide proxy just rewrite the url there.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Maybe someone can write simbl plugin to automatically redirect 10.9 to 10.8 version.

What I'd really like to do is redirect it to a local copy since it _will_ presumably all go down some day. IIRC I actually had trouble figuring out how to download the site, I don't understand what is going on with the hash links.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

The first thing I would normally try to do is pull a copy of https://help.apple.com/Library/Documentation/Resources/Flamingo/6/flamingo.js out of Internet Archive, but just my luck, IA appears to have been hit by a cyberattack as of this writing.

 

[f54da]

>redirect it to a local copy since it _will_ presumably all go down some day

That's a good point yeah, I'd like a local copy too and it presumably is just a bunch of text so shouldn't take up that much space.

>pull a copy of

I did try that, taking the js contents and then manually pasting it in devtools to see if it did anything. Maybe doing it in that order doesn't work though.

 

[maverick28]

In my case, I went a tedious way by manually editing relevant entries in each book's Info.plist and HelpViewer preference plist holding corresponding bookmark entries, for the Help Viewer to accept a new URL. It can and should be automated rather easily by way of a small shell one-liner, but I haven't gotten around to doing it. Luckily, the pattern is uniform and therefore straightforward, but to arrive at the precise URL, one has to plod through a time-consuming task of going over every variant of a meaningful segment in the linked path. The final Help URLs are the next or previous closest neighbours of the last app version compatible with Mavericks, that is, they're Mountain Lion- or Yosemite-compatible. Surprisingly, the Lion and Mountain Lion Help pages load. I know this since I still run Lion (10.7).


Examples of active links (getting the main help book remote URL and bookmarked help pages. Those act as anchors which are preserved from the old form):

$ PlistBuddy -c 'Print HPDBookRemoteURL' /Applications/Final\ Cut\ Pro.app/Contents/Resources/FinalCutPro10.help/Contents/Info.plist 
--->https://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.2/


$ PlistBuddy -c 'Print Bookmarks:com.apple.FinalCutPro10.help:0:BookmarkPath' /Users/home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpviewer.plist
--->https://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.2/index.html?localePath=en.lproj#ver4e32ca5


$ PlistBuddy -c 'Print HPDBookRemoteURL' /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/iTunes.help/Contents/Info.plist
--->https://help.apple.com/itunes/mac/12/

 
$ PlistBuddy -c 'Print Bookmarks:com.apple.iTunes.help:0:BookmarkPath' /Users/home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpviewer.plist
--->https://help.apple.com/itunes/mac/12/index.html?localePath=en.lproj#itns2937

 

[Wowfunhappy]

This is the original flamingo.js file from the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230921163646id_/https://help.apple.com/Library/Documentation/Resources/Flamingo/6/flamingo.js

I've also attached a copy since the Internet Archive is still having some issues atm.

 

[f54da]

But does it work with the page? When I tried copy pasting the JS into devtools it didn't do anything.

 

[iPodNano3]

What I'd really like to do is redirect it to a local copy since it _will_ presumably all go down some day. IIRC I actually had trouble figuring out how to download the site, I don't understand what is going on with the hash links.

this is unrelated but i swear i see you at almost every corner of this website its crazy

 

[Wowfunhappy]

But does it work with the page? When I tried copy pasting the JS into devtools it didn't do anything.

...well, something is working.

I downloaded https://help.apple.com/textedit/help/10.9/help/index.html?lang=en with sitesucker (which I think is just a frontend for wget). By itself, this downloaded copy won't display anything (white screen) due to the missing flamingo.js. If I add in flamingo.js from the internet archive, I can see a page that says "Help is currently unavailable." in many different languages.

But I don't know how to make the downloaded copy actually show the help pages.

 

[f54da]

Since you have a proxy set up why not proxy the flamingo.js url to a working copy (this can also be done with a chrome extension).

This should still be morally equivalent to just copy pasting the JS into the page after the fact (via devtools) but that didn't work when I tried

> how to make the downloaded copy actually show the help pages.
The flamingo.js triggers Ajax requests to additional content. Really the best way would be to basically record the whole web interaction, using something like https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Since you have a proxy set up why not proxy the flamingo.js url to a working copy (this can also be done with a chrome extension).

This should still be morally equivalent to just copy pasting the JS into the page after the fact (via devtools) but that didn't work when I tried

Squid is set up in such a way that it's pretty annoying to modify. However, I did a local override of the library URL in Chrome devtools (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/overrides#override-headers), and after putting in the JS from the internet archive and changing the content type in response headers to "application/javascript", the page loaded.

I'm currently trying to figure out how to use pywb... Edit: and it's not going very well, especially since I need to override that flamingo.js URL.

 

[f54da]

> local override
Woah I did not know that was possible

>pywb
Maybe pywb is overcomplicating it. Can you just look at the additional XHR requests that are made and then include those in your sitesucker copy?