Windows chm files on OS X updated

I already have written about opening and viewing windows compiled html help format files (.chm) on osx before. They are nice and useful because they contain html files, all compressed into one easily transferrable file. Unfortunately despite this format being quite popular in the windows world, OS X has its own help file format. OS X also prefers pdf files. However me being a coder guy, I have several ebooks in this file format, and sometimes I make my own chm files - e.g. downloading a complete website and compressing it into this file format. 

For instance, I am dealing with drupal as well, and I do not like to always pop up a web browser to look for api docs. The guy at hiveminds.co.uk has compiled API docs for drupal 5 / 6 here: v5, v6. Have a look at it, if interested.

My previous best chm viewer was chimp. It was working OK, but there was no universal binary (intel) version of it. So it had PPC code only, and thus run quite slowly on my core2 duo machine. Too bad. Now almost a year has passed, and somehow I felt the need to look for an other viewer (before starting to code one myself ;D). So it happened that I have found iChm. This is the best chm file viewer available for OS X. It requires OS X 10.5 at least, so if you have not yet updated your Tiger install - please do it now.

Again, the URL for this very nice and fine app is here:

http://www.robinlu.com/blog/ichm/

Here’s the feature list lifted from his site:

 

Features

  • Fully built with Cocoa. No ugly window and slow rendering.
  • Tab browsing
  • Search. Result sorted by relevance.
  • Text encoding detecting/switching
  • Find in the page
  • Tag powered bookmark
  • Back/Forward
  • Text zoom
  • Locate current document in table of content
I have not yet tried the tag powered bookmark feature yet, but it also looks interesting. I also have to add, it is amazingly fast (like a well behaved OS X application :)). Search works well, tabbed browsing also works without a hitch. I can recommend it to you wholeheartedly. This is the best app to view chm files on OS X at the moment. I have yet to find a chm file that looks ugly in it…
And a screenshot from one of the most often searched chm file on my system:
iChm with PHP docs
This app worths donating some money to its creator.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 06:50 and is filed under OS X & Mac, eng . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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