Serious Questions
Serious Questions
- Subject: Serious Questions
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 15:57:35 -0400
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. 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. Searching Interface Builder's "Help" found ZERO
hits for "inspector"! 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? Every
time I turn around someone is touting Cocoa as an easy thing to learn.
For whom, I wonder?
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?
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?
Finally, is it really okay to ask low-level questions in this forum?
Because I have a ton of them! Or should I just give this up and start a
Cocoa Cult list for the hoards of wannabes like me? Sorry for being so
flip, but it's the only way I know how to avoid screaming!