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Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

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Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#101

Post by wool_gather »

oflannabhra wrote: post #18

A couple years ago, maybe around Swift's debut, Apple began to mark all their sample code, projects, programming guides, technical notes, etc, as deprecated and unmaintained with a header on each page stating so, and putting it all in their "Documentation Archive" [0] They've had a new push to make sure that the remaining official documentation is available in either Swift or Objective-C, but I have yet to see any at…

All this, yes. And the ongoing use of "shadow documentation" where important details are mentioned halfway through a WWDC presentation but not written down anywhere is a hair puller too. Especially when they start taking down videos covering APIs that are still in active use!! (WWDC videos apparently have a 5-year lifespan at the moment. While 5 years is a long time and a lot can change in that period, not everything changes.)

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#102

Post by ahbyb »

supernes wrote: post #94
scarface74 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right because 50% of the US mobile market only buys a phone because it’s an “accessory”.

People would still buy iPhones even if Apple decided to purge 99% of apps from their store.

Which would make sense since 99% of apps probably have fewer than 100 downloads each.

(Yes I know this is not your point, just a little joke)

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#103

Post by 52-6F-62 »

dnautics wrote: post #52
52-6F-62 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. As much as I appreciate their responsiveness on Twitter, it doesn't much help those of us who are not on Twitter. (Tangential rant: I dislike how it seems like the most effective path for anything resembling customer service from many companies is to call them out on Twitter alone. I've written emails to some companies over months to no single response—but to look on their Twitter you'll see an answer within ho…

That shouldn't be surprising as Twitter is a public forum, so there's more accountability.

I'm not surprised. I'm a bit miffed, though. We shouldn't have to shame companies to get a bit of customer service—let alone a response to an email.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#104

Post by GGfpc »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #70

Some time ago, I was contacted by Apple to apply for a job. My code is insanely well-documented. I like to think that a lot of the inspiration for my code docs comes from Apple's open codebases. Their code is exceptionally well-documented. In any case, as is usual with all employers, these days, they completely ignored the focused, relevant links that I sent them to elements of my extensive portfolio of repos, and, i…

To be honest, while documentation is extremely important in the real world, interviews are time-constrained, and it makes no sense to write documentation when you have 45 minutes to implement something like that.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#105

Post by dtech »

omaranto wrote: post #80
jtchang wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a "cascaded nil-coalescing operator" ?

Something like a.?b.?c which is syntactic sugar for: a && a.b && a.b.c (with a short-circuiting &&.)

This is Javascript/Typescript only, and not really correct.

    a?.b
    a && a.b
will behave differently if a is false or 0 or an otherwise "falsy" value.

It's identical to something similar though

    (a !== undefined && a !== null) ? a : b

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#106

Post by School-Cotton »

w0utert wrote: post #89
School-Cotton wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree wholeheartedly that it’s garbage. I don’t want to watch videos, I want comprehensive, detailed API documentation. Here’s one obvious example that comes to mind: how do I turn on the GPS on iOS? This is documented nowhere. The answer is that location requested with an accuracy above 100 meters will use cell towers, below 100 will use WiFi geolocation, and below some other threshold (10 meters? I forget) will u…

If these are the 'best worst examples' you can come up with after ~3 years of iOS work, they are not really convincing. I just scanned the CoreLocation docs, and while it is true they do not explicitly state what sources are used for getting a certain accuracy, the documentation makes it very clear and unambiguous what you should use. You use kCLLocationAccuracyBest if you need to be absolutely sure you have the high…

Your assertion in the first paragraph is not actually true. Go to Central Park or somewhere else with no nearby WiFi beacons and try it out. Your test app will not fall back to GPS accuracy. I have done this. So actually the documentation you’re quoting is wrong.

As for what you might want to know the maximum address space size for: evaluating whether unattributable production crashes might be due to running out of address space.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#107

Post by coldcode »

I've spent most of my programming life doing Apple stuff (in between Java and C++ non Apple stuff too) and the only really good docs they ever had was the old paper Inside Macintosh in the 80's. Even when I worked at Apple at DTS in the mid 90's we had to hire someone to go around to every engineering dept and find out wtf they just shipped to provide developers something, anything, as documentation. That was back when Apple lost tons of money. Now the excuse can't be financial. Maybe they don't care enough?

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#108

Post by ensiferum »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #70

Some time ago, I was contacted by Apple to apply for a job. My code is insanely well-documented. I like to think that a lot of the inspiration for my code docs comes from Apple's open codebases. Their code is exceptionally well-documented. In any case, as is usual with all employers, these days, they completely ignored the focused, relevant links that I sent them to elements of my extensive portfolio of repos, and, i…

Most interviewers don't give a crap about one's GitHub/Bitbucket/X portfolio. It might help one to get the interview in the first place but after that point it's useless.

Why?

Because any single interviewer has a set of well rehearsed questions they know like the back of their hands. They know the different possible solutions and understand their pros and cons. This makes the interviewing a routine that lessens the brain drag. I in an interview setting you wan't to know your shit.

Using the candidates online source code repo portfolio would mean that the interviewee would have to try to understand the candidate's code and whether it'd be applicable to the intended role and how well the code would lend itself as a measuring stick for the candidate's skills. This is a lot more work and so obv it won't be done.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#109

Post by accatyyc »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #88
jtchang wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a "cascaded nil-coalescing operator" ?

Think the ternary operator, but worse. In Swift, this is expressed by "??". It means "If the previous test returns nil, then execute what is after the ??". For example, if you have a concrete Int, but the source might be an optional, then you could do something like this: let a = b ?? 0 That means that if b is nil, then set a to 0. Otherwise, set it to whatever value b has. You can chain these, like so: let b: Int? =…

In Objective-C (and some other languages with ternary operators) the same can be written like this:

    int a = b ?: c ?: 0

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#110

Post by mikestew »

moron4hire wrote: post #73
nullandvoid wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it's a discounted OS is it really a comparison? We're talking about one of the biggest platforms in the world here with unlimited money to throw at this problem there is no excuse

Seriously, Apple is one of the richest companies in the world (I don't remember if it's still The Richest or not). Similarly, Google's documentation is pretty bad, considering just how ludicrously rich they are. They could afford to hire entire teams whose only jobs were to write documentation and it would barely make a blip in their bottom lines. In contrast, I've always found Microsoft's documentation to be incredi…

hire entire teams whose only jobs were to write documentation

In contrast, I've always found Microsoft's documentation to be incredible.

I don't know how Apple and Google work, but as a long-time-ago MSFT employee, I can tell you it is because they have entire teams. Chain-of-command, senior-level, leads, managers (don't know if there's such a thing as User Ed VP/Director, though) the whole works, like Microsoft kinda took it seriously or something. Hence my ranking of docs:

1. Microsoft: could be better, but you're going to have an easy time finding worse. No, they're actually pretty damned good. When I worked there, for instance, there was a big push that example code will be secure. The mantra was "sample code becomes production code". APIs have close-to-real-world examples of usage. "Could be better"? Eh, I don't know what I'd improve, frankly.

2. Back before they got really big, I'd say about Apple's docs, "does the job; it's not Microsoft-quality, but they don't have Microsoft resources, now do they?" Umm, that's not true anymore, and I think the quality has gone down since.

3. Google: just use Stack Overflow. The docs are just going to frustrate you with their incompleteness and outdateness.

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