Last Week on My Mac: Top Tips or clunky cosplay?

I don’t recall seeing any Apple app promoted from the ranks as fast as Tips. It didn’t exist in Monterey, when it was still the neglected HelpViewer app lingering unloved in CoreServices. Then in Ventura it took on its new name, while staying hidden, as it remained in Sonoma too. Come Sequoia, it has leapt from version 10 to 15 and joined Apple’s first league apps between Time Machine and TV in the main Applications folder.

We can all recall the fall from grace of Network Utility and now Keychain Access, in leaving the main Utilities folder to go to their demise in CoreServices, but I don’t remember any other app making that trip in reverse, and so quickly. Of course, the app that now presents itself as Tips knows that it’s still actually com.apple.helpviewer inside, so is this real change, or merely cosplay?

When researching articles here, in most cases my first task is to consult Apple’s support documentation, in both Help pages and its extended support articles. The Tips app could now be a useful front end for that, although it doesn’t seem to offer anything more than a search in Safari does, and in some respects isn’t as helpful. Try searching Tips for terms like pin or pinning and you’ll see anything but its use in iCloud Drive, for which only the official phrase keep downloaded proves fruitful.

Tips currently appears stunted in other respects. Although it reluctantly gives access to the contents of third-party Help books, provided they’re in the traditional format and not PDFs, the only ones it offers for browsing are those for Apple’s apps. Disappointingly, it can’t find or open any man pages, where Apple now keeps a lot of more important information, for which you still have to open Terminal or resort to a third-party alternative.

It’s only when browsing Apple’s own documentation that you realise how much of it now lacks illustrations. Its model-specific hardware guides are the exception, and are accompanied by excellent labelled images, but Tips limits those to currently shipping models. If your Mac is Apple silicon but more than a year or two old, then you’ll just have to resort to the web. Sections aimed at the novice, such as Set your Apple Account picture, are well supported by cutouts from screenshots. But look at Store files in iCloud Drive, and there are five substantial topics with just a single lightbulb icon and no screenshots.

For me the biggest disappointment is that Tips only offers what’s readily available, in terms of technical content. If it isn’t in an existing Help book, then Tips draws a blank. Search for DFU mode, restore firmware, or even how to restore mac firmware, and Tips can’t find anything to suggest from among the main Help books. Extending its scope to include All Topics only finds useful results if you already have Apple Configurator installed, in which case it’s surely simpler just to open that app’s Help book directly, as Tips doesn’t include it in its list of User Guides either. This is all the more disappointing, as Apple has published an excellent support article entitled How to revive or restore Mac firmware, readily found by searching in Safari, but apparently beyond the scope of Tips.

This initial version feels clunky in other respects. Most annoyingly, it’s incapable of remembering what you were last reading. Every time you open the Tips app, it returns to its default home page, rather than restoring its contents to those shown when you last quit the app. As there’s no means of bookmarking items, you’ll find yourself wasting a lot of time navigating back to information you’ve already found. Neither does the app support more than its single window, and has no way of splitting that to allow you to refer to two or more pages at the same time.

In its current state, it’s hard to see how it justifies its place among Apple’s first league apps, which makes me wonder whether it’s destined to use AI in a future release of Sequoia. However, for that to be any improvement, Tips is going to have to broaden and deepen its knowledge, or it may as well crawl back to CoreServices and its former name of HelpViewer.