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Re: The challenge for Cocoa's on-line documentation
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Re: The challenge for Cocoa's on-line documentation


  • Subject: Re: The challenge for Cocoa's on-line documentation
  • From: Johnny Lundy <email@hidden>
  • Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 16:16:48 -0400

I never had any problem with a language's documentation since 1970 with the IBM 360 Reference Manual. That is, until I came across Apple's documentation of Cocoa. I have never been so frustrated in my life.

- Everything is defined in terms of something else.
- Interface Builder User Guide ignores the dozens of checkboxes and popups that appear in the Bindings panes and instead rambles on for pages about rarely-used features.
- "Examples" always say "Your code here" when My Code Here is what I wanted to see.



The usual pattern for a User Guide & Reference Manual is for the User Guide to have chapters corresponding to the areas of the product, and the Reference Manual having a page or so listing all the details of each element. The Apple docs have neither.


Like this:

- tag
Returns the tag.
See also : setTag

Great. Now if only I knew what a tag was....

Try looking at the documentation for NSDatePicker if you want to see how NOT to write documentation.
On May 17, 2008, at 9:17 AM, email@hidden wrote:


Re: The challenge for Cocoa's on-line documentation

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