• Open Menu Close Menu
  • Apple
  • Shopping Bag
  • Apple
  • Mac
  • iPad
  • iPhone
  • Watch
  • TV
  • Music
  • Support
  • Search apple.com
  • Shopping Bag

Lists

Open Menu Close Menu
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Lists hosted on this site
  • Email the Postmaster
  • Tips for posting to public mailing lists
Re: Is there a tutorial/sample for displaying...
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Is there a tutorial/sample for displaying...


  • Subject: Re: Is there a tutorial/sample for displaying...
  • From: Nicholas Riley <email@hidden>
  • Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 17:51:14 -0500
  • Mail-followup-to: dave dowling <email@hidden>, email@hidden

On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 06:34:44PM -0400, dave dowling wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 15, 2002, at 05:55 PM, Nicholas Riley wrote:
> >
> >Sure, but wouldn't you get tired of answering the same questions week
> >after week?
>
> no. on lists where i know the topic well, i do one of the following:
>
> 1. let someone else answer. there's often someone who just
> learned what's being asked and is dying to share, or would be
> helped by explaining what they've just learned.
> 2. if no one answers within a day or two, i answer it.
> 3. if i don't want to explain it all again, i answer it like
> this: good question! we were just talking about that last week.
> the thread was called "how to do that thing". you can search the
> archives and get the whole story.
> 4. if i were just too sick and tired of answering the same
> question, i'd erase the message rather than jump the person.

I hope I didn't appear to advocate the last response (I'm not!).
There's a difference between feeling frustrated at the lack of a
solution and taking the frustration out on others.

> it's also basic etiquette to be kind to people. we can encourage
> those who don't know what we know and make them productive members
> of the list, or we can be unkind to them and make them go away.

Sure. We're not born with this stuff, but there will always be a
distinction, however unclear to an observer, between people who want
to learn and who 'just want an answer to their question'.

> if you'd like to help the person, you could say:
> do such and such a search at developer.apple.com to find what you need.
>
> i typed that in fewer than 5 seconds.

Sure. I would have answered if someone else didn't get to it
first. :-) I was only citing this as an example of someone who
could, had they known where to look, found their answer without
needing to post to the mailing list at all.

> these are excellent suggestions. i've emailed the admin on this
> list in the past, and he's a nice and helpful guy. maybe you could
> suggest these things to him. perhaps he'd agree to send an email
> to new subscribers outlining where to look for basic info, and how
> to solve one's own problems before approaching the list. that
> might cut down on the super-basic questions.

Something like a meta-FAQ for Cocoa/Obj-C would help all of us. Bill
Bumgarner's long post to cocoa-dev or macosx-dev a few weeks ago would
be a great start. Apple's doing a better job of this; the little
movie they recently posted that shows how to look up documentation in
Project Builder was a great help. I didn't know about the
option-double-click for documentation shortcut until I watched it.

--
=Nicholas Riley <email@hidden> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>
Pablo Research Group, Department of Computer Science and
Medical Scholars Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
_______________________________________________
cocoa-dev mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.

  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: Is there a tutorial/sample for displaying...
      • From: Ben Hines <email@hidden>
    • Re: Is there a tutorial/sample for displaying...
      • From: Scot Gellock <email@hidden>
References: 
 >Re: Is there a tutorial/sample for displaying... (From: Nicholas Riley <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Is there a tutorial/sample for displaying... (From: dave dowling <email@hidden>)

  • Prev by Date: Re: Is there a tutorial/sample for displaying...
  • Next by Date: Problem with drawers porting...
  • Previous by thread: Re: Is there a tutorial/sample for displaying...
  • Next by thread: Re: Is there a tutorial/sample for displaying...
  • Index(es):
    • Date
    • Thread