Apple's official discussions forum on Apple's own web site has been carrying iPhone developer threads for many months. Have a look at any of the dozens if not hundreds of threads here: http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=164
At no time have the moderators stepped in to say these discussions are inappropriate - in fact, there's been a separate thread on the pros and cons of setting up a dedicated iPhone developer forum! Right, this is great, I'm sure this will help somewhat, but there's 2 things I'm looking for that these discussions may/may note provide that I know coreaudio-api will (or should)...
1. discussions specific to audio 2. discussions that could wield a response from an Apple employee - or better yet, a member of the coreaudio-api team
I don't want to necessarily throw my questions into a big pool of questions alongside App Store problems or questions about the UI framework, my moderately difficult questions would easily get lost in the shuffle and drop down the list quickly (it's happened before) - and I feel that the only people who could really answer some of these questions are ones who are part-and-parcel involved in writing the audio code for the iPhone. These are problems that have no answers in the documentation and/or the documentation is vague.
We *have* gone through the issue of filing bug reports, but there's (understandably) so many stacked up and there's a proper format which usually takes 20 minutes to fill out accurately, when in some cases it's as easy as a "yes" or "no" answer (can it do this? DOES it do this? = yes | no), and not necessarily a *bug*. I hate to clog up the system with something that's not an actual issue that conflicts with the documentation.
Perhaps I'm approaching this the wrong way, and someone please correct me if this IS the wrong way, but I don't feel like a "general discussion" is the right place for some of these unavoidable "niche" questions regarding audio and its behavior on the phone.
> realistically, it's pretty impractical to develop an app for a > brand new platform without asking anyone for help.
Actually, this is exactly what we did. Barring one question that we had to burn through a tech support incident for (which I wish we hadn't - it, again, was a yes|no answer), we did it all from documentation and "the barrage method" (I won't go into that here).
Having someone from Apple answer these question in an informal forum - like what has been done here on coreaudio-api - is the best way to approach these, imho. Bill and his team have done a pretty darn good job answering all sorts of questions whose answers simply aren't in the (infamous) documentation for the desktop OS - I'm just looking forward to the time when they can answer questions regarding the phone.
Ev Technical Knowledge Officer Head Programmer/Designer Audiofile Engineering
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