KNAppGuide
KNAppGuide is a Cocoa framework for embedding "guides" into your application. Visually inspired by Apple Guide from the System 7 and 8 era, this framework brings this idea to the modern world of Cocoa.
Demo video:
Features include:
- Beautiful, intuitive tutorials to guide users through your application. A HUD window presents your guide content while a bold, clean highlight highlight the area in your application’s UI the user should focus their attention on.
- Intelligent UI handling. The guide will automatically move along as the user performs actions in your app. This makes guides much easier to follow, as your app’s user experience isn’t fragmented by having to click “Next Step” after every action.
- Easy integration. Using KNAppGuide is easy. Import the framework, build a guide in code or in a file (or a combination of the two). If you have your guide in a file, you can load it and begin its presentation in three lines of code.
- Extensible. If KNAppGuide doesn’t do quite what you need, it’s fully extensible out of the box - have it interact with your custom controls or present your guide content with your own custom guide UI. The guide loader is smart enough to instantiate any custom classes and set custom values without any modification to it at all.
Planned features include:
- A program to author help content so you don’t have to manually make plists.
- ... that’s it, so far. Submit feature requests please!
Using KNAppGuide
Adding KNAppGuide to your application is simple:
- Add the KNAppGuide framework into your application.
- Set up a “Copy Files” build step to your app’s build that copies files to the Frameworks folder, and add KNAppGuide to it.
- #import <KNAppGuide/KNAppGuide.h> in the class you’d like to use KNAppGuide in.
To load a guide from file and present it takes an almost negligible amount of code:
id <KNAppGuide> guide = [KNAppGuide guideWithName:@“Sample Guide.plist”
resolver:[KNAppGuideBasicKVCResolver basicResolverWithBaseObject:self]];
KNAppGuideHUDPresenter *presenter = [[KNAppGuideHUDPresenter alloc] initWithGuide:guide];
[presenter beginPresentation];
[presenter release];
Downloading the Framework
Note: To build the framework, you need a working copy of BGHUDAppKit. This is a wonderful framework for HUD controls, and Interface Builder needs a copy of the IB plugin to compile the XIB files that contain the controls. If you don’t have this framework and aren’t interested in downloading it, you’ll find a pre-built (but not necessarily up-to-date) version below.
The code is available on our public BitBucket repository: http://bitbucket.org/ikenndac/knappguide/. Instructions for getting the latest code are included on that page.
You can also download version 0.3 of the KNAppGuide project below. This includes a pre-built version of the demo application and framework if you’re not interested in the code, or don’t have BGHUDAppKit on your system to compile it from the repository. However, it is strongly recommended that you use the repository as that’ll stay more up-to-date than this page.