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Apple broke a lot of its developer reference urls... again.

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Re: Apple broke a lot of its developer reference urls... again.

#11

Post by petewarden »

TomOfTTB wrote: post #4

In my more paranoid moments I think Apple is actively trying to make it difficult to develop for their products. I know how crazy it sounds but it's not entirely irrational. I mean, how can a company that puts so much effort into perfectionism do something like this by mistake?

It's a culture thing. Steve created a much more ambivalent relationship to external developers than the usual love affair most tech companies strive for.

Microsoft has always been about the ecosystem, for Apple third-parties are always a threat to a smooth user experience. When the video driver on your mom's PC crashes, does she blame Nvidia who wrote the code or Windows?

Re: Apple broke a lot of its developer reference urls... again.

#12

Post by mahmud »

jcl wrote: post #9

I notice Microsoft regularly breaks its own developer URLs as well... even the links from within Visual Studio's help system to their online content. It's sad that the most reliable way to find documentation is through Google.

MSDN is a mess, so much so that at a previous employer we setup our own MSDN server and hacked it up with a wiki, we mirrored entire sites, including Sysinternals and Windows Developer Journal and the DDK sites; MS specially fucked this company up so bad, in other respects as well, that the teams were warned against adopting any new Microsoft technologies; we stuck to raw ODBC and NT driver model, even for Vista.

Re: Apple broke a lot of its developer reference urls... again.

#13

Post by invisible »

jcl wrote: post #9

I notice Microsoft regularly breaks its own developer URLs as well... even the links from within Visual Studio's help system to their online content. It's sad that the most reliable way to find documentation is through Google.

... Or bing. Maybe it's a deep rooted conspiracy to get you on bing. Or not...

Re: Apple broke a lot of its developer reference urls... again.

#14

Post by jcromartie »

TomOfTTB wrote: post #4

In my more paranoid moments I think Apple is actively trying to make it difficult to develop for their products. I know how crazy it sounds but it's not entirely irrational. I mean, how can a company that puts so much effort into perfectionism do something like this by mistake?

I don't know which URLs are broken, but I don't have a hard time finding docs from Apple. I rarely view docs based on a URL another dev passes along. We usually trade advice like "check out the UIViewController doc" or "read the Threading Programming Guide" instead. In an ideal world the URLs would be consistent and concrete, but they're really secondary in this particular culture. I think you're making a mountain out of a mole hill to be paranoid about it.

Re: Apple broke a lot of its developer reference urls... again.

#15

Post by dkokelley »

makecheck wrote: post #2

Yeah, I've seen this several times. I don't know how they put the site together, but it doesn't sound like it would be a hard problem to solve. As weird as it is on the web, it's even weirder in their developer tools. I kid you not, there are HTML files in "/Developer/Documentation/DocSets/com.apple.ADC_Reference_Library.CoreReference.docset/Contents/Resources/Documents/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Cl…

Quick request: Do you think you could put 2 spaces in front of the long url so that it doesn't distort the page layout. That way people will only have to scroll to see the url, and not the rest of the page. Thanks!

Re: Apple broke a lot of its developer reference urls... again.

#16

Post by kogir »

jcl wrote: post #9

I notice Microsoft regularly breaks its own developer URLs as well... even the links from within Visual Studio's help system to their online content. It's sad that the most reliable way to find documentation is through Google.

Or you could install it locally... The installed MSDN library is rock solid. I've yet to find an instance of the online docs being better.

When I have used online help in visual studio, the worst problems I experienced were some formatting issues.

Re: Apple broke a lot of its developer reference urls... again.

#17

Post by kogir »

petewarden wrote: post #11
TomOfTTB wrote: post #4

In my more paranoid moments I think Apple is actively trying to make it difficult to develop for their products. I know how crazy it sounds but it's not entirely irrational. I mean, how can a company that puts so much effort into perfectionism do something like this by mistake?

It's a culture thing. Steve created a much more ambivalent relationship to external developers than the usual love affair most tech companies strive for. Microsoft has always been about the ecosystem, for Apple third-parties are always a threat to a smooth user experience. When the video driver on your mom's PC crashes, does she blame Nvidia who wrote the code or Windows?

You make an excellent point. Given the low quality of the driver ecosystem, I'm amazed that most Windows machines function at all. ATI, Creative, and Silicon Image are at fault for 90% of the BSODs I've ever experienced.

Re: Apple broke a lot of its developer reference urls... again.

#18

Post by makecheck »

dkokelley wrote: post #15
makecheck wrote: post #2

Yeah, I've seen this several times. I don't know how they put the site together, but it doesn't sound like it would be a hard problem to solve. As weird as it is on the web, it's even weirder in their developer tools. I kid you not, there are HTML files in "/Developer/Documentation/DocSets/com.apple.ADC_Reference_Library.CoreReference.docset/Contents/Resources/Documents/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Cl…

Quick request: Do you think you could put 2 spaces in front of the long url so that it doesn't distort the page layout. That way people will only have to scroll to see the url, and not the rest of the page. Thanks!

I wish I'd done that earlier, but I only thought of it after the editing window (2 hours?) was gone. I can't fix it now...

Re: Apple broke a lot of its developer reference urls... again.

#19

Post by jrockway »

jcl wrote: post #9

I notice Microsoft regularly breaks its own developer URLs as well... even the links from within Visual Studio's help system to their online content. It's sad that the most reliable way to find documentation is through Google.

Incidentally, Google tends to break CPAN's documentation a lot. If I visit the "canonical URL" for a module, something like http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Foo::Bar, it always works. If I google for Foo::Bar, though, sometimes I get linked to http://search.cpan.org/dist/Foo-Bar-0.17, which is 404 because the author deleted version 0.17 and uploaded 0.18.

Amusing that other people have the opposite problem.

Re: Apple broke a lot of its developer reference urls... again.

#20

Post by btn »

jcl wrote: post #9

I notice Microsoft regularly breaks its own developer URLs as well... even the links from within Visual Studio's help system to their online content. It's sad that the most reliable way to find documentation is through Google.

Ideally, this shouldn't happen anymore; or, at least they've designed the current system to stop it from happening: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163845.aspx
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