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

FROM : Kevin Grant
DATE : Sat May 17 01:57:19 2008

Wikis like CocoaDev can be nice for filling these gaps.  I find
it helpful to see not only the articles, which are usually
practical, but also visitor comments.

For example, someone can easily add a statement to a 4-year-old
page, pointing out a new approach that works better.  Or, a
debate can begin, where people show multiple solutions or point
out problems they've had.

Kevin G.


> 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