When HELP files become UNHELP files

A few years ago the only Java IDE's that were available for free were so primitive that using them to teach Java was painful. We had to load several to enable students to exploit the different features. Transporting programs between them was a nightmare. This changed considerably for the better when NetBeans became available. It combined most of the necessary features and was, best of all, for free. Since then different versions have seen the light, each improving on the previous, the latest being release 6. 0 . On the positive side, where the students used to have long lists of errors displayed after a compile, most of these are now caught during typing. Unfortunately, building more and more wisdom into the typing phase also creates its problems. After starting to use the latest release we were confronted by a message "add @Override annotation" when we tried to override the "clone( )" and "toString( )" methods. This has never before happened so the help files were scoured. Trying to find anything in the Help files on this topic was impossible. With the expansion of the features the help files have expand correspondingly and have become, to say the least, unhelpful files. After quite a bit of wasted time and a disbelief that it wasn't addressed in an easy to find position, the alternative was to Google and apply some guesswork. When does the expansion of a system's features complicate it so much that it becomes mostly useless.? We find this problem with so many other systems as well, for example, cameras, video equipment, cellphones, etc. Most people use very few features because it is all they need. Learning the other options just requires too much time and effort and will be forgotten as they are only used sporadically, if at all. Sun has gone Open Source with their JDK 6 project .