Re: Apple, Are You Listening?
Re: Apple, Are You Listening?
- Subject: Re: Apple, Are You Listening?
- From: Scott Anguish <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2004 15:21:22 -0400
On Jun 1, 2004, at 9:13 AM, Karl Goiser wrote:
Hello,
I am generally a lurker, sometimes popping up to ask an inane
question, often too late to contribute to the list...
What is the cocoa-dev mailing list? When you think about it, it is
actually a problem solving list: somebody asks, "how do you do this",
or "I can't get this to work" and generous people respond with
suggestions.
that is answered best by About The List on the web site.
The Cocoa Development list is for discussions regarding native Mac OS X
application development using the Cocoa Frameworks: Foundation and
Application Kit. Cocoa is one of the principal application environments
for Mac OS X, based on advanced object oriented APIs that allow
development in Java and Objective-C. Subscribers to this list discuss
frameworks, features, and technical issues specific to Cocoa
application development.
It occurred to me the other day that the cocoa-dev mailing list could
be used by Apple as a source for determining areas that could be
improved. So.. if they looked at the types of problems that people on
the list have and did a simple frequency count, they'd find the most
common problems and problem areas. These areas could then be targeted
with better documentation, tech notes or addressing the code base
itself.
Several Apple employees read the list, but nobody is assigned to read
the list. It's intended as a form of communication amongst developers,
not from developers to Apple. Not all the people who read the list and
answer questions who work for Apple post from their Apple.com
addresses. I don't, yet I'm upfront about what my job is (writing Cocoa
docs for Apple) as are others.
Of course, the next step would be to look at the problem areas and try
to find out why people have problems with them and try to address the
issue in general.
And this happens, to a degree. However, the only approved method of
providing feedback is using bugreporter.apple.com.
We can read the list and often diagnose areas that need improvement,
but it's not always clear exactly what the developer has read, hasn't
read, etc. And that requires direct information from the developer. In
addition, it's bugs to a large extent, that prioritize what gets worked
on and when.
Image the possibility of diminishing the number of messages to the
list by pre-empting problems?
in many cases the issue is that people don't read the existing docs or
can't find the doc, and people end up pointing them to them. In other
cases people are just trying to work around issues, or do things that
are not covered be the docs.
So, this might be countered by saying that that's what the faq's and
searchable archives are about. True. But consider the extreme case
where Apple might look at an area where people are having problems and
fix it in the code. Wouldn't that be wonderful and fantastic for
everybody?
those fixes are driven by bug reports. Often examples of what is
broken (i.e. sample code from the developer) is required. You just
can't get that from monitoring the list, and it certainly isn't an
effective way of doing it.
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