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: Rua Haszard Morris <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 11:46:44 +1200
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.
But there is no clear specific conceptual reason (that I know of) why
a list of these connections could not be made more user-editable.
What's more, this makes documenting simple code examples much harder,
as the drags all need to be documented in a necessarily less-rigourous
way (and possibly compounded by IB changing over the years).
On a related note, it's been said (I'm paraphrasing) that the dragging
connections is doing really cool useful stuff under the hood for me;
I'm guessing that after reading all the conceptual docs and some more
detailed info I might understand how to do it in code... but why is
there such a disconnect between the textual and graphical approaches?
But have no fear, I'm loving developing using Cocoa :) - I just can't
stand by and not add my agreement on the "room for improvement" and
"support different development approaches" issues.
I don't claim that text is superior for everyone - but for me it is of
value.
PS what's inferior about writing code? (I am curious as to whether
dragging connections is an accessibility for blind Cocoa developers ...)
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.
And can you be 100% certain that there is no possible way of improving
the docs or development environment that would have eased this process
or you?
In this I am an optimist - I think that there are ways the
documentation and development system as a whole could be improved
(without compromising or shortcutting important conceptual issues) to
allow Cocoa development to be easier to get into and do. And I don't
think that would be a bad thing for the Mac platform as a whole..
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