Re: Cocoa Browser [was Re: NSMutableNumber?]
Re: Cocoa Browser [was Re: NSMutableNumber?]
- Subject: Re: Cocoa Browser [was Re: NSMutableNumber?]
- From: Ondra Cada <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 20:43:30 +0200
On Monday, September 23, 2002, at 07:38 , Jeremy Dronfield wrote:
Well if a majority of Cocoa developers use the thing, I can understand
why such a number of trivial questions occurs in cocoadev!
I think that's got more to do with deficiencies in the docs themselves
than with using the wrong browser. I'm not surprised you didn't get to
grips with CB when you only gave it five minutes. It takes at least six
or seven minutes to get fully accustomed to it. Anyway, Ondra, I don't
mean to flatter, but do you *ever* need to consult Cocoa docs?
I do, *VERY* often. Some has been kind enough to say that I am rarely
wrong: well, that would be since some 90% of my answers are written *after*
a quick docs consultation.
I use a fulltext for that (MarshmallowLibrarian is the one which seems to
me to be the currently best one, though I still very bitterly lack
DigitalLibrarian's power and efficiency). Sometimes I use ProjectBuilder
instead: it is pretty good as soon as it has its indexes, but it lacks
very seriously the ability to search things like Release Notes or
Tasks&Concepts along with the class docs.
And that's the main reason why things like HeaderViewer of the past or
CocoaBrowser of the present are, in my opinion, good for nothing: rarely
you actually want to check "stringWithFormat:"! Normally you want to do a
fulltext search for string formatting instead, which would probably also
hit things like localization, Strings tables, and componentsJoinedByString:
-- one of which can save you a lot of ugly work with stringWithFormat.
Not speaking, of course, of release notes which say you where are known
bugs (well, should), etc.
Well the browser part is nice enough (though cutting out just one method
description is very very bad: showing the complete document and just
scrolling it to the desired desc would be infinitely better, since the
context is important too)
That's the reason I never liked browsing the docs from within PB. I don't
like having to scroll through a (sometimes enormous) list
No! You don't have to -- a decent browser/viewer OF COURSE gets you to the
proper place automatically.
The vast difference is that with full doc one can immediately follow
anything interesting inside the document: doubleclick the word, Cmd-e,
Cmd-g Cmd-g Cmd-g...
Well if a majority of Cocoa developers use the thing, I can understand
why such a number of trivial questions occurs in cocoadev!
I think that's got more to do with deficiencies in the docs themselves
than with using the wrong browser.
I am pretty sure it's not. I've learnt the thing in NeXT days, when there
was much less of "Task&Concepts"-like docs. The one real advantage I had
to those who learn Cocoa now was DigitalLibrarian.
---
Ondra Cada
OCSoftware: email@hidden
http://www.ocs.cz
private email@hidden
http://www.ocs.cz/oc
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