Re: What is the status on the New Cocoa 2.0 Books?

FROM : Thomas Engelmeier
DATE : Thu Mar 13 20:41:00 2008

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