For the record, my comments weren't about it being difficult; it's
about the documentation not providing the information needed to use it.
It's a beautiful API, as you say with tons of work done to implement
these reusable constructs. The documentation is voluminous, but in too
many cases just repeats the name of the method or rephrases the method
name. The examples stop just when they were getting to a line that
would illustrate how to use the construct. And most of the items don't
have an example.
Tutorials to me are pretty much useless, as I am not looking for a
"step by step" cookbook to just getting something working, but rather
a discussion of the why. How many times have we seen a tutorial say
something like "control-drag from the textfield to the File's Owner
object?" (just a random example). OK, I can do that, but it is a waste
of my time - it's like paint-by-number when trying to learn art. Take
the "Currency Converter With Bindings" much-touted tutorial; it
actually uses a method that is deprecated.
It's my eagerness to explore and understand all of this rich
collection of functions that frustrates me when the documentation
doesn't go into enough depth.
If I thought the API itself had problems, I would just give up. I have
heard people, very successful Java programmers, say they "didn't care"
for Obj-C/Cocoa. Not me - I want to learn all I can. I have no Java
books and six Cocoa books. I think this API is the coolest thing ever.
Thus the frustration with the documentation.
But I am still very very hesitant to put another NSPopUpButton on my
interface, because of the complete absence of guidance on how to
implement the thing, and the many days it took to get a single one
working, and even now I have no idea why it works - one of the random
combinations of checkboxes and popup choices did the trick.
I can do target/action and outlets - I want to learn bindings. If it's
a single-term binding, I can do it now.
I'm just going to finish Aaron's third edition, which arrived two days
ago, and see if anything has changed in things like model key paths,
isa-swizzling and so forth.
Well what can you do. Not sure why but lately many newcomers have
been showing up and complaining about Cocoa's difficulty.
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