On Mar 13, 2008, at 5:43 AM, Thomas Engelmeier wrote:
Maybe it paid off to be a "late adoptor". "Inside Macintosh:AppleTalk" and "New Inside Macintosh:Quicktime" / "New Inside Macintosh:Interapplication Communication" set a very high standard for documentation - far higher than the IBM UI guidelines and the Windows 3.x docs from that time.
Inside Macintosh was a great series, but the versions you refer to really were a 2.0 version of the toolbox documentation. The original Inside Macintosh volumes, though far better than much of the developer documentation of the day, came in numbered volumes that were less than perfectly organized. We also had to contend with the fact that all the code examples were written in Pascal early on, long after most developers had switched to C.
The current reference might be neat, but IMO it lacks severely what made up the NIM series: Describing the architectural goals of an given API.
Pointing out a terse description in one fairly new class (it's new with Leopard) is hardly indicative of the overall quality of the developer documentation, which is excellent. In many places, Apple goes into great detail about the architecture underlying a particular framework. I don't think we would have had ANY documentation in our hands about such a new method so soon after it came out "back in the day", and the only hyperlinked API reference available back then (Think Reference) probably wouldn't have had any information about this new method so soon after its release. "Back in the day", we would have been digging through header files and trying to figure out what the heck was going on, trying to figure out what some opaque handle was used for or figuring out what the gestalt values were for some new library or extension. Those big books were awesome, but they had quite a lead time and the APIs were a heck of a lot smaller then than they are now and tended to change less often. The fact that even before Leopard shipped to the public, we developers were able to option double click on that class in Xcode and get an accurate description of its methods and properties is pretty amazing, and I find it hard to believe anyone would prefer going back to the days of dead tree Inside Macintosh documentation. The documentation may not be perfect, but I still say we're spoiled.
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