Re: The challenge for Cocoa's on-line documentation

FROM : Andy Lee
DATE : Fri May 16 23:42:02 2008

On May 16, 2008, at 5:05 PM, Erik Buck wrote:
>  [Re-post from http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/message/cocoa/2007/8/20/188026
> ]


That was well worth reposting.

This may partly answer my question about why people don't notice or 
study the concepts docs.  Maybe we're too used to clicking on search 
results and getting fast answers to small questions; we're not used to 
methodically reading introductory material and building a foundation 
of understanding, at least not to the extent required by Cocoa.

When I was a NextStep programmer, it was clear to me that concepts 
docs came first, then reference docs.  I don't know if NeXT did all 
that much to reinforce that mindset.  It may just have been because I 
hadn't been spoiled on Google yet.

(Not to knock Google.  Searching for "blah site:developer.apple.com" 
is often -- not always, but often -- *much* more likely to return 
relevant hits than searching with the Xcode documentation window.  I 
assume this is because Google has much more data and better algorithms 
to be able to assign relevancy to web pages.  On the other hand, 
Google can't do a "Contains" search.)

--Andy