Help

Help & In-App Documentation

Cine Power Planner ships with a built-in Help panel that covers every major feature without leaving the app. This page is a meta-reference: what the Help panel offers, how to reach it, and where to find longer-form guides.

Opening the Help panel

The panel is fully offline — all topics are bundled with the app and load from app/src/features/help/data/help-content/{en,de}/. No network call is made when you open Help.

What the panel covers

93 topics across both English and German, organized into eight categories:

• Getting Started — quickstart, dashboard, offline workflow, keyboard shortcuts
• Projects — create, version, archive, duplicate, gear-list workflow
• Equipment — device library, owned gear, accessories store, ROI tracking
• Collaboration — sharing, presence, connected crew, conflict resolution, comments
• Tools — PDF utilities, camera tools (Frame Line Composer, DoF Simulator, Lens Coverage), power calculator
• Reference — glossary, error codes, FAQ, troubleshooting
• Commerce — billing, invoices, banking, accounting, contracts
• Settings — profile, sync, backup/restore, data management, privacy

Each topic renders as markdown — headings, tables, lists, and code blocks. If a translation is missing on your locale, the panel falls back to English.

Help-panel features

• Search: type a query at the top of the panel; topics filter in real time with fuzzy matching.
• Voice search: mic button next to the search box uses the browser's Web Speech API. Hidden where the API isn't available (Firefox, some Capacitor surfaces).
• Saved searches: bookmark up to 20 queries. Persists across devices via cloud sync.
• Search history: up to 20 recent queries with relative timestamps. Clear individual entries or all of them.
• Related topics: each topic ends with a "Related Topics" list — up to five entries, scored by shared category and keyword overlap. Every topic currently fills all five.
• Category filters: chips above the results filter by Getting Started, Projects, Equipment, Collaboration, Tools, Reference, Commerce, or Settings.

Guided tours

The Help panel has a Guided Tours tab with 79 interactive step-by-step walkthroughs in full English + German parity (DE parity reached 2026-05-03):

• A first-time setup tour offers itself automatically on first login — on desktop and on phones/tablets alike. On touch devices it adapts: it skips the desktop sidebar and keyboard-shortcut steps and instead points out the bottom navigation bar.
• The tour opens with a brief welcome screen — one tap to begin, or "Skip for now" — followed by a handful of short, numbered steps. You can leave any time with Esc.
• Completed tours are tracked so you can pick up where you left off.
• Tours auto-resume if you leave past step 2.
• Starting a tour for a specific screen takes you there — or, when a step points at something that only appears in context (an open project, an export panel, a selection), tells you how to get to it.
• Cover the major feature surfaces: projects, gear lists, templates, billing, ATA carnet, time tracking, analytics, data management, banking, invoices.

Your guide, Mr Watts

Guided tours are presented by Mr Watts — the app's logo with a face, arms and legs, who arrived with the First-Time Setup tour in v0.516.0. In the pink theme he is Miss Watts; it is the same character with pink anodising, and his name follows through the tour copy automatically.

• He walks in through a doorway on the welcome screen, then stands on the tour card for the rest of the tour.
• He points at whatever the step is about, from the corner of the card furthest from it — so he never covers the element being highlighted.
• His eyes follow your cursor. Hover him and he perks up; click him and he winks. Keep clicking and he eventually loses his composure.
• Under the operating system's reduce motion setting he holds still and simply changes pose between steps.

He guides every tour, not only First-Time Setup. His pointing pose is derived from where the highlighted element sits relative to the card, and most tours also give him their own poses along the way.

Longer-form documentation

The Help panel is the quick-access surface. For deeper guides, see the linked feature docs:

The full doc catalog is in the Documentation Index.

Admin: help analytics

Admins can review search behaviour at /admin/search-analytics (top 50 queries + zero-result queries). Same isAdmin guard as /admin/feedback. Use the zero-result list to find documentation gaps.

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Last Updated: 2026-09-07 Version: 0.750.47