RE: NSScrollView and general IB annoyance
RE: NSScrollView and general IB annoyance
- Subject: RE: NSScrollView and general IB annoyance
- From: Brian Hook <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 10:48:38 -0700
- Organization: Pyrogon, Inc.
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Well, my two pennies worth: Don't add tooltips. You can't fit
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information enough to tooltip so as anyone who don't understand the
class
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is enlightened;
For the window attributes, a context sensitive help that puts you into
an interactive helpviewer would be much, much more preferable than tool
tips, granted.
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OTOH, for those who do know the class, the options are generally
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understandable. There can be some exceptions, but just now I
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can' recall any: try to explain, say, "Deferred" or "One Shot" in a
few words
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to someone who never bothered to read NSWindow.html (and thus quite
probably
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has no idea what a "window device" is and how it relates to
NSWindow)!
This is just a gross simplification of the development process. I
assume most people learn things the same way I do -- you read some docs,
write some code, read more docs, write some code. Having an interactive
help/documentation feedback loop GREATLY accelerates the learning
process. Look at the DirectX help documentation for an example of this
-- you can just bounce around learning as you go.
I don't fully understand things just by reading the documentation then
doing it. It's an iterative process, and the tools have to contribute
to the learning process by making information accessible. I may
understand how an NSWindow works in general, but maybe I don't know off
the top of my head what "one-shot" and "deferred" mean. But I'll learn
it MUCH faster if I can just click on the item, hit F1 (or whatever),
and get taken straight to a definition.
Learning is a process where many variables slowly coalesce into a
general understanding of the topic. I've read Learning Cocoa at least
five times now, but I still don't "get" Cocoa because text in a book is
meaningless without context and experience to amplify the words. So I
write code, look at sample code, read Web sites, read this list, etc.
trying to learn. Tools that fight me by making trivial searches of
basic information difficult are not conducive to educating developers
about cocoa.
I mean, how hard is it to add a feature where I can click no a method
name and a dialog box pops up with various links to the method (cf.
MSVC++). Didn't NextStep have a really high quality help engine?
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Instead, please, put any spare time you might be willing to
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use on improving the Cocoa on filling _REAL_ gaps (just grep docs for
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"forthcoming" to see what I mean -- the 10.0 docs are somewhat
swarming by it; I
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haven't seen 10.1 ones yet).
I have to agree with this, however there are two sets of documentation
gaps: introductory material for new Cocoa programmers, and basic
reference docs that are necessary for everyone. I think these are both
very important and non-competing as far as I'm concerned.
Actually, let's try to get rid of "grep" as a help search tool as a
first step =)
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For the sake of newbies, you might add to Help menu an item
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(and/or a button
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to Inspector, somewhat like it is in WOBuilder), which would
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open by default
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the appropriate doc page in a default HTML viewer.
This would be a huge first step.
Brian