RANT--was "help" URLs
RANT--was "help" URLs
- Subject: RANT--was "help" URLs
- From: Brian Howard <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 18:35:48 -0400
On Friday, August 3, 2001, at 05:22 PM, Ondra Cada wrote:
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Nope, those are little dirty tricks of the HelpViewer <expletion
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deleted>.
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Eg., one of its charming features is that it does not allow you to
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select
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and copy as God meant it should be done; thus there is a considerable
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number
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of special "links", which -- if clicked in the rot -- would move the
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text
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into pasteboard ;)
Well, hell. . . I was thrown off by the wording of the Omni warning,
which seemed to indicate that clicking on the stupid icon would take me
to Apple across the internet for the latest inside scoop. Blah! All
this thing does is copy the code to the clipboard? Well, it's faster
than having to select first, but I just wasted several hours with this
undocumented--as far as I know--feature. Note to Apple: if this is
documented somewhere, the reason I did not find it is because your docs
are scattered all over the place, without a coherent page numbering
scheme, in several formats, requiring several diverse "tools" to use,
and when you do find something that seems of interest it's either too
bloody cryptic, superficial, or "description forthcoming!
Note to guardians of the Priesthood: this rant is NOT aimed at the
coders and software engineers at Apple who do the actual work. Far as I
can tell, they rock! Rather it is aimed at management, who needs to get
a clue--and quick. I am not the only one out here who wants to code in
Cocoa who does not happen to have a degree in Computer Science; some of
us merely have degrees in Physics, or Chemistry, or Microbiology, or
Space Physics, or Medicine. Many of us have only programmed in
Fortran. Now we want to embrace Cocoa, but you tell us we must first
jump through a bunch of hoops that are not required for any discernible
reason. Like my friend Fast Eddie said: "I don't mind spending hundreds
of hours trying to get my head around some wrinkle in Quantum Mechanics,
because that's secret of the Universe stuff. This Apple programming
shouldn't be that hard; it's merely rocket science."
I feel like the guy that decided to learn French, because he was going
to France for vacation. But the only book he could find to help him
learn was a Spanish/French dictionary! Most people in this situation
would just give up, which is what most people trying to start with Cocoa
are doing; I will keep at it, and in the end I'll be up to speed with
Spanish as well as French, thanks to Apple insisting on making me pay my
dues. But damnit, all I want is to avoid ordering snails for dinner.
<End Rant>
There's more, but I guess you are not that interested, are you?
Lay it on me, please!
Brian E. Howard
Cocoa Cult Central
false alarm: it was only angina!