• 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: Flame retardant
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Flame retardant


  • Subject: Re: Flame retardant
  • From: Brock Brandenberg <email@hidden>
  • Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 10:29:28 -0500

Hi all.

Now to add some constructive ideas to this topic.

Cocoa.mamasam.com has been invaluable to me because of the threading of the messages and because the search engine actually works, unlike Apple's (Apple's result snippets are pretty much useless, and does boolean searching or quoting of phrases even work there with that HTML dig thing?). I can find something on nearly any topic with little trouble because it has the resources and I know how to search, but many newbies don't know how to search well and obviously some don't even try.

Bertrand's new directory brings up an idea which could help the repeated newbie question. The list has a number of message threads that have excellent answers to many topics. Would you consider it a decent idea to design a directory or table of contents that lists these topics in a manner that mimics Apple's doc organization? Each topic entry could either be a link to the first message(s) of a thread or a link that is a query itself that extracts the relevant results. We could of course add new entry listings to make up for Apple's weakenesses, inserting topics where they are sorely needed. The concept is similar to the C++ FAQ book that you can buy at the bookstore. It's a composition of FAQs that is invaluable as a C++ developer. The author(s) have organized it reasonably well so you can locate useful info relatively quickly.

As a more experienced developer, if someone handed me an outline like Apple's Cocoa Documentation page and asked me to find matching topics in the lists, I bet I could pull 85% of the relevant topics out, given a little bit of time, and with some help from a couple of other veterans, I bet we could hit all the needed ones. This idea is geared strongly toward Bertrand, and I would be glad to put in the time to work on it. I'm trying to organize the knowledge that I've gained and give back to the Cocoa community (right now in the way of articles on Cocoa Dev Central) to make the docs better. It's a shame to have such an incredible development environment, but have to work so hard sometimes to find the answer to something that was just someone's oversight in the Apple documentation or its organization.

Brock Brandenberg

----- industrial design @ bergdesign.com ------
_______________________________________________
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:
    • Constructive Ideas
      • From: Bertrand Mansion <email@hidden>
  • Prev by Date: Re: receiving mouse events outside of my window
  • Next by Date: HeaderDoc vs AutoDoc
  • Previous by thread: Re: Flame retardant
  • Next by thread: Constructive Ideas
  • Index(es):
    • Date
    • Thread