Re: AppKit source available as reference?
Re: AppKit source available as reference?
- Subject: Re: AppKit source available as reference?
- From: jgo <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 19:35:15 -0700
>
"Erik M. Buck" <email@hidden> Sat, 2001-06-30 16:54:40 -0500
>
Would anyone care to identify "good" documentation?
In this context it is any documentation that unambiguously
conveys to me how to figure out how to do what I want -- the
application functionality I'm aiming to provide -- with the
tools provided. It would have to answer questions like:
What class could I/should I use? How can I find a class that
would let me do x or determine that there is none such?
How would I go about delegating or sub-classing that class to get
this behavior and how to get that behavior?
>
Would anyone care to identify a more consistent or clearer framework?
I agree; no other frame-work I've run across is any more consistent
or clearer. There are occasions in others when I've entertained
the notion that things were named in such a way as to throw you
off from what they reall are/do, and there's not so much of that.
The formulaic nature of much of the reference documentation for
other frame-works pretty much matches that of Cocoa... but I'm
not trying to develop using them just now, so my interest is
focused on getting the Cocoa docs, etc. to be better.
>
Maybe some people's though process is like Cocoa and everything
>
is natural and obvious while some people think anti-Cocoa?
This is the key. I suspect that if your thinking about how
to go about setting things up and doing is perfectly aligned
with the way the developers have it, you'd think it was all
wonderful, intuitive, consistent, etc. But, if your thinking
is different about any detail of meaning or process, then
all bets are off; none of it will make any sense & everything
you try will be "broken", so experimenting will do little good.
It's the latter folks who would benefit from better documentation
that showed how things fit together conceptually -- not in a
detached philosophical manner, but all across the board from
general approach to strategies of programming to tactics to
details of dragging this and clicking that. It looks to me
like part of the general philosophy is documented, and some
(many?) of the fine details are, but filling in the middle is
still needed, and the suggested additions to the tools will
certainly help.
One thing that's been niggling at me is that, despite the intended
modularity, the tiniest attempts to alter behavior from the "standard"
often causes things to flat not work and require major restructuring.
Shouldn't all these interdependencies be documented, too.
Well, onward...
John G. Otto Nisus Software, Engineering
www.infoclick.com www.mathhelp.com www.nisus.com software4usa.com
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Will program Macs for food.