Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
- Subject: Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
- From: Jason Stephenson <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 18 May 2008 09:36:05 -0400
Julius,
You could change Apple for just about any other vendor, and Cocoa for
just about another GUI/system interface, and your argument will still hold.
(Have you ever tried programming X11 with just XLib C calls? Nasty stuff
that....)
Also, please don't confuse the language, Objective-C in this case, with
the frameworks/system interface. Objective-C is a very small language,
and it is easy to keep the main things in mind. PL/1 is another matter
altogether.... (So is C++ if you think about it.)
Cocoa is much larger, but the same could be said of C and XLib
respectively. Not to mention that on X you have many different GUI
toolkits to choose from to abstract away the complexity of XLib: Xt, Qt,
Tk, XAW, Motif, GNUStep, Gnome, KDE, etc., etc.
Modern computer systems are complex. There are many, many options of the
programmer. If modern computer systems lacked this complexity, and if
the published interfaces did not have APIs available so that programmers
could make adequate use of this complexity, then we'd be stuck where we
were in the early '80s, having to roll our own library for everything.
I don't think you can expect to lose the learning curve in any
programming interface. APIs expose complexity, and at the same time,
cover it up. Imagine if you had to implement your own
Model-View-Controller paradigm for your GUI widgets before you could
start making your own applications? That is the situation that you'd be
in with something like XLib, or even the old Macintosh Toolbox. Today,
that complexity is abstracted away rather neatly by the Cocoa framework,
just as it would be on X if you used Motif or Qt or some other toolkit.
If you do want to just jump in and start writing code, then perhaps you
should look into Python or some other "scripting" language. They do an
even better job of hiding the complexity.
I also don't find any great difficulty in using Apple's documentation.
The conceptual documents cover the concepts, and the reference
documentation serves as a reference. No, I don't think you should learn
to use Cocoa just from the conceptual documents, but I'm sure it is
possible.
The simple fact of the matter is that documentation, just like a GUI,
cannot be all things to all people. Programmers and those interested in
programming are a particularly eclectic bunch. We each come at Cocoa for
the first time with different experience, different reference points,
and different expectations. One set of documentation cannot be expected
to handle all of the possible permutations of programmer knowledge and
experience. For this reason, other books exist written by third parties
to cover those gaps or target different audiences.
In summary, I think it is a problem of all programming documentation and
programming interface regardless of the platform or language, and I
don't really see a way for a single vendor to resolve the issue, not do
I think they really should.
Well, I'll shut up, now.
Cheers,
Jason
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