Helpify provides a very simple means of generating HTML that is properly formatted for use as Apple Help, including navigation links, abstracts and the HTML comments used as segment commands by Apple Help. Though it’s not a full-blown help authoring tool, Helpify is used to create the help books for all current Omni Group products.

If your project is not too complex and you have a copy of OmniOutliner lying around, you might want to give Helpify a try. Big thanks to William and Omni for releasing this very useful tool!

As the release notes say:

CVSNT and VMware Tools are incompatible.
There is a known incompatibility between CVSNT (…) and VMware Tools. You should uninstall CVSNT if you want to install VMware Tools to use Unity view, and to use cut-copy-paste or drag-and-drop between your virtual machine and your Mac.

While you can work around the clipboard issue by exchanging text between host and guest via a public pasteboard file stored in a shared folder, it’s aggravating that this sort of kludge should be necessary and especially astounding considering that “Unity Improvements” are among the selling points for the new version.

According to an employee comment in a recent thread, it’s the CVSNT Server control panel that VMware Tools don’t get along with, and a fix is in the works for the next release.

So if you’re not running a CVS server on your virtual machine, you can solve the problem by removing the CVSNT Server control panel via Add or Remove Programs (select CVSNT, click the Change button, select the Modify option and disable the CVSNT Server components).

Restart the guest system and re-install VMware Tools in the virtual machine. After another reboot, Unity view should work properly, and you can still connect to remote CVS servers using the client components of CVSNT.

It’s a shame VMware didn’t manage to include this solution in the release notes…

While you can easily remove files and re-add them under a new name or location, this method loses the precious nuggets of wisdom contained in the file’s history — you do enter meaningful commit messages, don’t you?

Although recent CVS versions (CVSNT 2.0.55 and later) include support for a new rename command, the feature is classified as “experimental” and it’s not well-supported by common clients nor well-documented in the manual.

However, it can be done — the key is to understand that rename operations are properties of directories, not of the files inside. So when you move or rename a file, it is essential to commit the folder containing the file — and (if you moved the file) the new folder as well.

Before using the rename command, you may want to back up your local working copy (sandbox) just to be on the safe side if anything goes wrong — and if it does, please don’t blame me!

The steps below outline the basic process.

To move (rename) an existing file in CVS:

1. If you’ll be moving a file to a new location that is not already under version control, create NewFolderName and add it to CVS with cvs add.

2. At the command line, navigate to current location of the file you want to move (let’s call this OldFolderName) and enter:

   cvs rename OldFileName ../NewFolderName/NewFileName

   (the file is moved to NewFolderName and renamed to NewFileName)

3. This is the important part! — Still in OldFolderName, enter:

   cvs commit

4. If you moved the file to a different folder, cd to NewFolderName and repeat the commit command:

   cvs commit

   At this point, the repository knows about the changes to OldFolderName and NewFolderName.

   Now, for good measure, we will update our local sandbox to be sure we have a pristine copy of the project. In fact, to really make sure the repository “gets it”, we’ll remove NewFolderName and verify that it returns on update.

5. So take a deep breath, and delete NewFolderName.

6. Then, finally, navigate to your project’s root folder and enter:

   cvs update -P -d

   (In this command, the -P option tells CVS to “prune” (remove) any empty folders in your working copy, and -d creates any missing folders like NewFolderName.)

That’s it. You’re done! — NewFolderName should reappear, and inside it, NewFileName will be waiting for you with its history intact!

What? It isn’t? — well, you do have that backup, don’t you?