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

FROM : Johnny Lundy
DATE : Sat May 17 22:16:48 2008

I never had any problem with a language's documentation since 1970 
with the IBM 360 Reference Manual. That is, until I came across 
Apple's documentation of Cocoa. I have never been so frustrated in my 
life.

- Everything is defined in terms of something else.
- Interface Builder User Guide ignores the dozens of checkboxes and 
popups that appear in the Bindings panes and instead rambles on for 
pages about rarely-used features.
- "Examples" always say "Your code here" when My Code Here is what I 
wanted to see.


The usual pattern for a User Guide & Reference Manual is for the User 
Guide to have chapters corresponding to the areas of the product, and 
the Reference Manual having a page or so listing all the details of 
each element. The Apple docs have neither.

Like this:

- tag
Returns the tag.
See also : setTag

Great. Now if only I knew what a tag was....

Try looking at the documentation for NSDatePicker if you want to see 
how NOT to write documentation.
On May 17, 2008, at 9:17 AM, <email_removed> wrote:

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