Re: Serious Questions
Re: Serious Questions
- Subject: Re: Serious Questions
- From: Andreas Monitzer <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 22:57:16 +0200
On Saturday, May 26, 2001, at 09:57 , email@hidden wrote:
I do not understand how a person is supposed to get started with Cocoa
when there is little, and very often NO documentation for even the
simplest things.
Take a look at
http://www.cocoadevcentral.com
I just dragged over a pop-up button to try and figure out how that might
work--not actually connecting it to anything, but just to see if I could
get it working on an interface level--but after thirty minutes of looking
everywhere I could think of I'm still at a complete loss. The inspector
window went away and I could not figure out how to get it back.
Cmd-Shift-I
Searching Interface Builder's "Help" found ZERO hits for "inspector"!
There IS actually an online help in IB? Didn't know that.
Now that's scary. The only thing I got to work was changing the names of
the three choices offered. But how do I reduce that to only 2 choices?
Or increase it to 4 or 5 items?
Press Opt and resize it.
Every time I turn around someone is touting Cocoa as an easy thing to
learn. For whom, I wonder?
For those that do the Apple's tutorials before clicking around in IB.
If I'm the problem then it must be that I don't have sufficient
background because I just had a full battery of cognitive tests and I'm
still a pretty smart guy. Damn smart, in fact. So is a couple of
courses 25 years ago in Fortran and a little TeX macro writing in the
meantime way too little to start from? Do I need to sell my shack here in
the Northern woods and move someplace where there are a few Gurus I can
hang out with and maybe pick something up that way? Buy a few rounds?
Do I need a goat, or will a chicken be sufficient sacrifice? If I go to
the dark side will I find the same problem there?
To be honest, I think you're missing UI usage experience. For example, the
Inspector is easily accessible from the menu.
Or is Apple giving the developer's tools disk to everyone who buys a
retail copy of OS X just a PR stunt? If I hang in there will this
dismal situation improve? Are the documentation floodgates soon to be
opened?
There's some documentation (
http://developer.apple.com/macosx
http://www.cocoadevcentral.com http://www.stepwise.com), but most of the
information is hidden in omnigroup's mailing list archive.
andy
--
Discussion forthcoming.