As I remember it, about 20% of DECs revenue stream came from
documentation, not software or hardware.
The English Department of my university produced a steady stream of
technical writers who went to DEC.
As you might imagine I come from a FORTRAN background followed by
procedural Pascal. Indeed Cocoa's
learning curve is steep but quite rewarding. Given my background, I'm
sure it's much steeper for me than for
someone with no programming background.
In general, I find Apple's documentation to be excellent and of much
higher quality than DECs. What is missing
for me is adequate code snippets and links to sample code. I tend to
learn how stuff works by playing with samples in the debugger.
I'll cite one example. I've been spending two weeks trying to get a
table to reloadData to a multi column NSTableView that
I created programmatically. Creating the table view was straightforward.
Getting it to populate is yet another matter. I've yet to
find an example of a TableView code sample that does this. Hillegass
uses a cute trick of using NSSpeechSynthesizer to
populate his dataSource but how about tables with multiple columns and
populating them in the first place. When I go to f
oundation documentation.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaFundamentals/CommunicatingWithObjects/chapter_6_section_4.html
doesn't show a code sample of a delegate. It says something about a
delegate being a NSResponder but doesn't even show a header example
of a delegate.
Similarly:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/TableView/Tasks/UsingTableDataSource.html
Makes no mention of InterfaceBuilder and/or bindings. Some links to
relevant sample code here would really help.
Finally, I find the Research Assistant do be indispensable. But given
Cocoa's novel syntax, the class references
could be improved by some code snippets that show how to message the
different methods from the sender.
Joseph Ayers
Jeff LaMarche wrote:
On May 21, 2008, at 3:06 AM, Scott Anguish wrote:
I'm not sure that how much is being 'paid' for the documentation is a
valid metric.
I believe (not speaking for the company of course) that both of these
areas are viewed as investments.
No, you're right, it's not a good metric, and I certainly don't want
you guys thinking that way. I guess my point was just that it's
important for us to keep it in perspective that Apple doesn't have
unlimited resources to handle the documentation tasks and that there
are third-party for-pay options that can fill the gap. Also, I meant
to point out that some of the comparisons that have been made in this
thread are comparing free offerings to decidedly non-free ones, which
isn't necessarily a fair comparison. I just think it's a good idea to
keep things in perspective and try and avoid a sense of entitlement
when we start discussing the way things should be.
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Northeastern University
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