If developers invest a lot of time in getting to know the product, chance is they will be more dedicated to it, so that they don't feel they lost so much time. This is another predatory tactic of this company.
On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
121–130 of 348 posts
Re: On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
#122O how the mighty have fallen!
If you haven't ever done it, take a browse through the Inside Macintosh Volume I pdf here. https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/
All API documentation should aspire to be this great.
Re: On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So instead you end up on 3rd party tutorials...How do you know if the feature changed significantly in the more recent release? I don’t know, but I can tell you where you won’t find out: the official docs. Get ready for documentation subscriptions. I wish I were joking.
Already a thing: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-companion-for-swiftui/id1485... No affiliation. It's sad and a bit pathetic that trillion dollar company can't hire even one person to work on public documentation.
It’s because engineers don’t want to write documentation, and if you don’t force it this is the result.
Re: On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
#124Has anyone else noticed that Apple has been slowly moving away from the long-form guides that were helpful at explaining core concepts? I remember once seeing a comprehensive guide on code signing, but over the years it appears to have been scrubbed from their documentation resources. In its place is a much less helpful (but prettier-looking) guide. In comparison, I've noticed Android has FANTASTIC developer document…
Android HAD fantastic documentation, just like Apple had 7/10 years ago. It might not be overly apparent just yet to everyone, but Android documentation is slowly following the same path as Apple documentation, where the experience is slowly degrading, but since it was so good a few years ago, that degradation didn't creep everywhere just yet. My coworker and me are already starting to feel the pain on various core A…
I feel like Android 11 is in a weird spot. Its a covid release and they didn't have their IO convention this year either. Seems like a lot of the big documentation dump is harder to find.
Re: On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
#125I swear to the gods of Cupertino I am not trying to start a flame war, but -- Apple fanboy though I am -- I recently started taking a look at Flutter and was absolutely floored by the difference in the state of documentation between the two. Leave aside all talk of the viability of cross-platform development. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about the developer experience of working with the documentation.
At my work there are two of us programming in Objective-C for our iOS apps. We lament that Apple seems to hate its developers. In my most dejected moments, I think of getting out of mobile development entirely, or diving deep into Flutter and getting a job doing that.
Re: On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
#126Has anyone else noticed that Apple has been slowly moving away from the long-form guides that were helpful at explaining core concepts? I remember once seeing a comprehensive guide on code signing, but over the years it appears to have been scrubbed from their documentation resources. In its place is a much less helpful (but prettier-looking) guide. In comparison, I've noticed Android has FANTASTIC developer document…
Android HAD fantastic documentation, just like Apple had 7/10 years ago. It might not be overly apparent just yet to everyone, but Android documentation is slowly following the same path as Apple documentation, where the experience is slowly degrading, but since it was so good a few years ago, that degradation didn't creep everywhere just yet. My coworker and me are already starting to feel the pain on various core A…
I wonder if this is on purpose and that some companies receive good documentation so that competition is kept at bay. Does Google offer some sort of training packages for Android or you can get a loan dev that knows all the quirks? I've seen this with other companies where documentation is poor on purpose so they can make extra money from training.
Re: On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and I know the complaints. Lets look at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/synchapi/... Function description, supported version information, header-file and library file information, meaningful return code documentation, links to an overview of the system wait behaviors, documentation about what happens in low power situations, links to example code using the function, differences in behavior bet…
Charles Petzold is immortal!
That is a good one too, but its not in as bad of shape as my official win32 guides from MS. My copy of Volume 2 of the win32 reference has nearly as much tape as paper, although I haven't picked it up in probably 10 years.
edit: Holy crap, in an effort to find an online picture of the volume, i noticed that amazon is selling the slightly newer ones for over $800. Looks like I should have taken better care of it.
Re: On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
#128I literally googled a few hours ago for "Why is Apple documentation so shit?" I mean, look at SwiftUI. Conceptually it's great, but it is also fucking buggy as hell, and I think one of the main reasons is that the developers themselves don't have good documentation available. The best documentation so far I found is this, but it's third-party: https://www.objc.io/books/thinking-in-swiftui/
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Re: On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Already a thing: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-companion-for-swiftui/id1485... No affiliation. It's sad and a bit pathetic that trillion dollar company can't hire even one person to work on public documentation.
It’s because engineers don’t want to write documentation, and if you don’t force it this is the result.
A trillion dollar company should be able to hire some technical writers to embed into teams and write documentation as part of the process. It's just a lack of care when you have that amount of money.
Re: On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
#130I swear to the gods of Cupertino I am not trying to start a flame war, but -- Apple fanboy though I am -- I recently started taking a look at Flutter and was absolutely floored by the difference in the state of documentation between the two. Leave aside all talk of the viability of cross-platform development. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about the developer experience of working with the docume…
You are totally correct- and the worst part is, it hasn't always been this way. I've been doing iOS and Android development since the days of iOS6, and for the majority of that time, I've found iOS documentation to be significantly more useful than Android's. Recently it has flipped, and it has truly come to a head in the release of iOS14, where many documentation pages still mark live APIs as Beta software. It's so frustrating, and it is so much worse knowing that the developer experience used to be so much better.