Re: What is the status on the New Cocoa 2.0 Books?
Re: What is the status on the New Cocoa 2.0 Books?
- Subject: Re: What is the status on the New Cocoa 2.0 Books?
- From: Jeff LaMarche <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:39:31 -0400
On Mar 13, 2008, at 5:43 AM, Thomas Engelmeier wrote:
Maybe it paid off to be a "late adoptor". "Inside
Macintosh:AppleTalk" and "New Inside Macintosh:Quicktime" / "New
Inside Macintosh:Interapplication Communication" set a very high
standard for documentation - far higher than the IBM UI guidelines
and the Windows 3.x docs from that time.
Inside Macintosh was a great series, but the versions you refer to
really were a 2.0 version of the toolbox documentation. The original
Inside Macintosh volumes, though far better than much of the developer
documentation of the day, came in numbered volumes that were less than
perfectly organized. We also had to contend with the fact that all the
code examples were written in Pascal early on, long after most
developers had switched to C.
The current reference might be neat, but IMO it lacks severely what
made up the NIM series: Describing the architectural goals of an
given API.
Pointing out a terse description in one fairly new class (it's new
with Leopard) is hardly indicative of the overall quality of the
developer documentation, which is excellent. In many places, Apple
goes into great detail about the architecture underlying a particular
framework. I don't think we would have had ANY documentation in our
hands about such a new method so soon after it came out "back in the
day", and the only hyperlinked API reference available back then
(Think Reference) probably wouldn't have had any information about
this new method so soon after its release. "Back in the day", we would
have been digging through header files and trying to figure out what
the heck was going on, trying to figure out what some opaque handle
was used for or figuring out what the gestalt values were for some new
library or extension. Those big books were awesome, but they had quite
a lead time and the APIs were a heck of a lot smaller then than they
are now and tended to change less often. The fact that even before
Leopard shipped to the public, we developers were able to option
double click on that class in Xcode and get an accurate description of
its methods and properties is pretty amazing, and I find it hard to
believe anyone would prefer going back to the days of dead tree Inside
Macintosh documentation. The documentation may not be perfect, but I
still say we're spoiled.
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