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: Alex Kac <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 19 May 2008 13:22:42 -0500
On May 19, 2008, at 12:27 PM, Jeff LaMarche wrote:
On May 19, 2008, at 1:11 PM, Alex Kac wrote:
However I believe that 99% of the complaints given - including mine
- are due to that really high hill.
I do not disagree with you there. It's a challenge, and frustrating
at times, and once you reach the peak and start down the other side,
you very quickly forget how hard it was :)
I know that feeling very well. My feedback is aimed solely at being
able to provide a viewpoint to Apple about how they could help new
developers get past that high hill. I really feel they could do it.
Now imagine you have little time to climb that hill every day. It
takes a long time and you get tired of fighting up that hill.
That's where I think Apple can do some work. Books like Erics and
Aaron's help immensely. Honestly the best dev books I ever read
were Inside Macintosh. Why can't we have an Inside Cocoa book?
Believe me, I can imagine that: I learned Cocoa in my spare time at
a point in my life where I had very little spare time. If you have
less time to spend per day, it's going to take more days to get to
the top of the hill. That's a truism, and I'm not sure that it can
be changed all that much by better documentation.
I think it can be. I'm not saying that all the docs have to be, but I
think a "Cocoa 1" and "Cocoa 2" and so on set of docs would be very
helpful. It can start out a lot like Hillegass's books and move on
quickly to a reference/sample code mixture much like IM had. That
would help immensely. Sometimes the fact that the docs are so
volumnuous and *seemingly* unorganized to the untrained eye is the
biggest docs issue.
As for "Inside Cocoa", I'm not sure it's an entirely fair example.
The documentation problem is an order of magnitude more complex than
it was in the days of the classic Mac Toolbox.
But I would argue that the various "Guides" combined with the API
references (and maybe the sample code as well) really ARE the same
thing as the old Inside Macintosh, there's just an awful lot more of
it (and there's no Pascal to be found anywhere). I would guess if
you took all the "Guides" from the dev website, it would constitute
tens of thousands of pages, or at least far more than all seven
volumes of the original IM. I think the problem is more organization
and volume.
OK - so lets have at least the basic AppKit in there for an Inside
Cocoa. If I can buy .NET and Win32 or even Java framework books that
are like IM why not something for Cocoa?
Are you going to WWDC, by any chance? That's a huge opportunity to
move forward more quickly.
Yes. I will be there. Primarily for iPhone work. And that, btw, makes
all this so much harder. I can't ask questions about any of it. MS
always has private lists for beta NDA SDKs.
--
Alex Kac - President and Founder
Web Information Solutions, Inc. - Central Texas Microsoft Certified
Partner
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