On 13.03.2008, at 13:39, Jeff LaMarche wrote:
On Mar 13, 2008, at 5:43 AM, Thomas Engelmeier wrote:
Maybe it paid off to be a "late adoptor". "Inside
Macintosh:AppleTalk" and "New Inside Macintosh:Quicktime" / "New
Inside Macintosh:Interapplication Communication" set a very high
standard for documentation - far higher than the IBM UI guidelines
and the Windows 3.x docs from that time.
Inside Macintosh was a great series, but the versions you refer to
really were a 2.0 version of the toolbox documentation. The original
Inside Macintosh volumes, though far better than much of the
developer documentation of the day, came in numbered volumes that
were less than perfectly organized.
Except the last IM volume (essentially describing System 7).
We also had to contend with the fact that all the code examples were
written in Pascal early on, long after most developers had switched
to C.
I considered the differences rather minor compared to e.g. other OOP
languages vs. Objective-C.
One could take the Pascal source and simply change some minor
syntactic sugar...
The current reference might be neat, but IMO it lacks severely what
made up the NIM series: Describing the architectural goals of an
given API.
Pointing out a terse description in one fairly new class (it's new
with Leopard) is hardly indicative of the overall quality of the
developer documentation, which is excellent. In many places, Apple
goes into great detail about the architecture underlying a
particular framework.
Fair enough, the "Programming Guides" and not References are the
equivalent to NIM.
[...]
The fact that even before Leopard shipped to the public, we
developers were able to option double click on that class in Xcode
and get an accurate description of its methods and properties is
pretty amazing, and I find it hard to believe anyone would prefer
going back to the days of dead tree Inside Macintosh documentation.
Call me old fashioned, I like the dead tree to grok an concept [i.e.
read "Programming Guide" books]. Even with the chance to get all the
"NIM: QuickTime" content as online docs I preferred to take out my
dead tree version and enjoy reading it comfortable outdoors to refresh
some details. 1200+ dpi is still far superior to 72dpi ;-)
[...] but I still say we're spoiled.
Exactly my point.
Regards,
Tom_E
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