What is Middlemac?

Middlemac is a help building system for macOS applications. It takes all of the frustration out of configuring Apple Helpbooks so that they work properly with your macOS applications.

Real Apple Help Books
Middlemac 3.0 produces Apple Help Books for your macOS applications that work exactly like Apple’s own help files. This is because it uses Apple’s own tools to make your help look and feel exactly like Apple users expect.
Multiple Targets
Use a single code-base to generate Apple Helpbooks with content specific to each version of your application.
Multiple Features Support
Similar to targets, multiple features support gives you much more fine-grained control over the content that appears in your Helpbooks.
Uses Proven Technologies
Middlemac is powered by Middleman, the static website generator behind hundreds of websites and blogs. It’s further powered by the huge ecosystem provided by Ruby-on-Rails. But don’t worry, Middlemac insulates you from the vast majority of this.
Cross-Platform
Although you have to be on a Mac to build the final product so that the Apple help indexer can run, you can do the bulk of your help file development on both Mac and Linux, and other platforms that Ruby supports.
Production Ready
Middlemac was developed to build the help system for all three versions of Balthisar Tidy.
FOSS
And of course, Middlemac is free and open source software.

Building all of your help targets is as easy as…

middleman build_all

That one terminal command can build all of your help targets, put them into the right Xcode project directory, and make them ready for Xcode to build into your application.

Complete Documentation and Sample Project

Middlemac’s documentation is also its own sample project, and includes a demonstration of every one of its features and a complete walkthrough. Look for the two sample targets in our manuals area, or go to them directly (will open in a new tab or window):