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: "Kyle Sluder" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 19:22:46 -0400
On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 6:58 PM, Rua Haszard Morris
<email@hidden> wrote:
> 2 Cocoa requires you when learning to implement things by clicking and
> dragging, which makes learning harder for some people (this is a real
> annoyance to me, why can we not see/edit these connections in a text file?
> why is there so much other crap in the nib xml? etc).
The fact that you have an XML version of the NIB is ancillary; it does
not exist to support editing by hand. It's there so that version
control systems which choke on binary files can handle NIBs better.
You're right that Cocoa -- or, more specifically, AppKit -- requires
you to click-and-drag a lot of things when developing. But why is
"seeing it all in a text file" superior? I fail to see how it's
anything but *inferior*, because you're not writing code when you're
doing the clicky-draggy-line-drawy part of AppKit development. This
is a very fundamental stumbling block for a lot of people who are used
to developing on other platforms, but it's really one of those things
you have to take on faith and just understand this is not your
previous environment.
> 3 There's a belief (among) that Cocoa is in some way special and these
> documentation (or more general) shortcomings/issues are not relevant or real
> or justified.
I actually think you're talking about two separate concerns. Cocoa is
very special, because it implements patterns that no other widely-used
framework does, and applies them rigorously and consistently. And I
think a lot of issues with the documentation are imaginary, or are a
result of not accepting or fully understanding how Cocoa differs from
previously-experienced platforms. Then again, I have been seeing a
lot of legitimate complaints arising recently in this thread and
others.
All I can say about this topic is that I ran into brick wall after
brick wall when learning Cocoa until one day when everything just
clicked. Like when I was studying statistics. Or the
Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm. You just have to say "I'm lost, I'll
keep clicking and dragging and voraciously reading and re-reading the
introductory, conceptual documentation until I get it, despite my
decade of software development experience."
--Kyle Sluder
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