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Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

830 点作者 chriskrycho超过 5 年前

46 条评论

Shank超过 5 年前
Maybe I&#x27;m the only one, but when I start looking into a project, I start at the API docs and work from there. I really need to know if key features I want are viable on the platform or not. If I want to use an accessibility API to, in a supported way, read all of the items in every menu in the menu bar, how do I do that? Is it supported? Is there a set of best practices I should follow?<p>The problem with not documenting things is that developers like me are turned off before we start. I don&#x27;t want to bend the platform so far that it breaks. I want the limits. I&#x27;m tired of reading stories about apps being pulled for using private APIs, or breaking in future versions because they&#x27;re removed. I want to do things in a supported way so I can make everyone happy.<p>Right now, I can&#x27;t even see the boundaries of what&#x27;s possible, because nothing is documented. I don&#x27;t even want to try to write for Apple platforms, because it&#x27;s entirely inscrutable and unpredictable.
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chooseaname超过 5 年前
&gt; Apple, if you want developers to love your platform — and you should, because good developers are your lifeblood — and if you don’t want them to flee for other platforms — and you should be worried about that, because the web is everywhere and Microsoft is coming for you — then you need to take this seriously. Adopt the mentality that has served other frameworks and languages so well: If it isn’t documented, it isn’t done.<p>Apple has enough rabid supporters, they can lose the occasional developer to bad docs. Apple doesn&#x27;t care or need to care. They are arrogant that way. Also, what other platforms? Android? A fair portion of iOS devs are <i>also</i> already Android devs.<p>Look, this is just going to fall on deaf ears. Apple isn&#x27;t listening. Their machine is output only.
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travisgriggs超过 5 年前
I work half and half pretty much maintaining the same app in both iOS and Android. Since the introduction of Swift, the Apple docs have become much terser (it&#x27;s like Jony Ives slimness fettish got a hold of them). Even with that, they&#x27;re better (by far) than what I find with the Android docs. The Android docs &quot;explain&quot; very little.
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mmusson超过 5 年前
When I first learned iOS ten years ago I thought the documentation was outstanding. It had good API level documentation as well as a large number of guides that showed the right way to use the API to implement particular features.<p>I recently returned to the platform and my experience is very much like the parents. The documentation appears to be almost completely missing. The built-in documentation does not appear to include any guides at all. The API documentation is largely the kind where the description is a more verbose form of the method name, and sometimes when Objective-C is selected the documentation is showing the Swift version.
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no_wizard超过 5 年前
I actually agree whole heartedly with the intentions behind this article. I find Apples documentation to be incomplete and not nearly as detailed as I think it should be.<p>I think that personally it’s not all that well organized either.<p>My minimum standard for good documentation has and always been Python’s[0]. While no documentation is perfect, I think they mostly get it right by providing good explanations and examples consistently throughout the documentation. I also like how it’s spilt up between modules and the code examples are routinely updated. I have found very little issue with Python’s docs. While it could definitely use more examples and and deeper content around asyncio in some parts (mostly around transports and protocols) on the whole its very good, to me it’s what all organizations should strive for at a minimum. I also want to call put Mozilla’s Developer Network (MDN)[1] as stellar, I reference and use it all the time and have genuinely been happy with it.<p>To be fair in assessments, I’ve also found links in Microsoft’s documentation that often link to things they have already marked as outdated or not going to be updated, or just don’t work like the GitHub links on this page:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;xamarin&#x2F;xamarin-forms&#x2F;user-interface&#x2F;controls&#x2F;views?WT.mc_id=docs-dotnet-xamarin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;xamarin&#x2F;xamarin-forms&#x2F;user-...</a><p>So I think a lot of documentation around the big platforms especially have a lot of work to do. This isn’t to say documentation is easy though. I sincerely hope that all this noise just means it becomes more of a priority. I know from experience that writing good documentation is hard and I don’t want this to come across like I’m faulting anyone in particular or organization in particular. I imagine with large and ever changing platforms it’s quite the challenge. I just wanted to point to some examples I believe get it right most of the time.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.python.org&#x2F;3&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.python.org&#x2F;3&#x2F;</a><p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;</a>
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danielinoa超过 5 年前
Funny thing is Microsoft has much better documentation on Apple&#x27;s very own frameworks. Simply compare their documentation on this arbitrary type (CIAffineClamp):<p>Microsoft&#x27;s Documentation: - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;dotnet&#x2F;api&#x2F;coreimage.ciaffineclamp?view=xamarin-ios-sdk-12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;dotnet&#x2F;api&#x2F;coreimage.ciaffi...</a> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;dotnet&#x2F;api&#x2F;coreimage.ciaffineclamp.-ctor?view=xamarin-ios-sdk-12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;dotnet&#x2F;api&#x2F;coreimage.ciaffi...</a><p>Apple&#x27;s Documentation: - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;archive&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;GraphicsImaging&#x2F;Reference&#x2F;CoreImageFilterReference&#x2F;index.html#&#x2F;&#x2F;apple_ref&#x2F;doc&#x2F;filter&#x2F;ci&#x2F;CIAffineClamp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;archive&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;Gr...</a>
butuzov超过 5 年前
This comment has nothing to do with apple, but about documentation in general.<p>I was trying to get into Kubernetes world via kubeflow, a machine learning platform that works on top of the Kubernetes. Well, I have run into a bunch of the missing examples, outdated articles, and things that just don&#x27;t work (all of that in official documentation).<p>I decide to change this a bit and start working on a small tool [1] that can help check documentation (at least reduce deadlinks in the documentation, when someone moves git files or just original source of info dies). Since I start working on it, I meet only one project without issues, all others.. well, they all had issues.<p>Maybe one day I post it on HN as a standalone link, but now here we go [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;butuzov&#x2F;deadlinks&#x2F;tree&#x2F;develop" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;butuzov&#x2F;deadlinks&#x2F;tree&#x2F;develop</a>
Amorymeltzer超过 5 年前
Last week&#x27;s ATP[1] had a segment on this, in particular a discussion of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nooverviewavailable.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nooverviewavailable.com&#x2F;</a> which has an estimated breakdown of what percent of each framework has documentation.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atp.fm&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;349" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atp.fm&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;349</a>
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edw超过 5 年前
Nowhere in the comments thus far has anyone pointed out that SwiftUI — the framework in TFA&#x27;s crosshairs — is in beta. I&#x27;ve written a relatively large amount of SwiftUI code and I get the impression that the design is still in flux. There are corner cases (as well as much more mainstream one) that haven&#x27;t been fully thought through. Beta 5 of Xcode 11 brought non-trivial changes to the API and I expect those to continue.<p>&quot;It&#x27;s not finished until it&#x27;s documented&quot; is a fine sentiment, but I don&#x27;t think Apple has remotely claimed that SwiftUI is finished.
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rubyn00bie超过 5 年前
It&#x27;s funny to read this and have it compared to Ember&#x27;s docs, especially since I&#x27;ve been using Chris&#x27;s site a fair bit over the past few months...<p>I only bring this up for posterity, but Ember&#x27;s documentation is terrible, and what is even worse is the Typescript documentation is almost unusable its so outdated. Chris&#x27;s site is the only place you can go to find anything and it&#x27;s incredibly difficult to make sense of or is already completely outdated... There are constant gotchas and missing documentation or things that are flat out wrong...<p>I can understand complaining some about Swift&#x27;s docs (though I&#x27;ve never had that problem), but comparing them to Ember&#x27;s seems like an awfully bad take.<p>P.S. I love Ember, learning it has just been nightmarish at points for almost no reason.
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cyberferret超过 5 年前
Still? It has been a while since I have done any Apple platform specific native development, but I remember about 5 or 6 years ago writing an iOS and OS X app for communicating with an audio modelling device, and the documentation for CoreMIDI was woefully lacking.<p>I couldn&#x27;t believe that a part of the Apple operating systems that had been ingrained for years had so little documentation and examples at that time. I ended up finding out more from a lot of third party blogs and via forums.<p>I haven&#x27;t checked, but are things like the MIDI framework still badly documented in the Swift docs?
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strictfp超过 5 年前
Apple payments APIs are the worst APIs I&#x27;ve ever worked with. They&#x27;re inconsistent, badly documented, have unannounced breaking changes and contain so many gotchas it isn&#x27;t funny. For example, some of the most relevant data is attached to the response but isn&#x27;t officially supported and may or may not be correct.<p>It&#x27;s not exactly fun to code up payment integrations, and so I was kind of hoping to get it over and done with. But with Apples payment APIs, we needed months of production data to figure out how to use them without shooting ourselves in the foot.<p>Using the API felt like interfacing with some badly configured eventually consistent MongoDB cluster that a bunch of juniors stuffed full of receipts, using the entirely wrong data model.
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Phillips126超过 5 年前
Docs are always something I evaluate before moving forward with a specific tool or language for a project. I have not done much work in the Apple ecosystem but it surprises me that a company of this size would have lackluster docs. It makes me wonder how many non-Apple developers give up on their idea for an app due to frustration and how that translates to lost profit for Apple given their 30% cut.<p>I am not a huge Golang fan but recently I found myself using Go quite a bit and I really appreciate their docs which include a description of each function and an example. The example code is even editable with a &quot;Run&quot; button so you could test and understand the function much better before moving it to your own code. Here&#x27;s an example if you are unfamiliar with Golang docs (click the &quot;example&quot; link for the editable code): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;golang.org&#x2F;pkg&#x2F;strings&#x2F;#Compare" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;golang.org&#x2F;pkg&#x2F;strings&#x2F;#Compare</a>
thfc06超过 5 年前
This is exactly what I&#x27;ve been dealing with for the last month, as I attempt to completely re-write an Electron app in Swift. The part about scavenging through WWDC transcripts particularly resonated with me. Coming from JS ecosystem, I was also shocked at how few google results (even stack overflow) would come up for issues I was running into.
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gnachman超过 5 年前
The comments in header files are often the only (or only useful) documentation. So don’t give up before looking there. Sometimes they wait a few years to write docs. For example, NSWindowAccessoryViewController went undocumented for three or four years. Which was fine because it was too buggy for me to use anyway. The docs are enough to get you started but it’s only brutal experience that teaches you how to use things. In practice you spend a lot of time working around bugs and design flaws. Those will never be documented, of course.
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coldcode超过 5 年前
I&#x27;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&#x27;s. Even when I worked at Apple at DTS in the mid 90&#x27;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&#x27;t be financial. Maybe they don&#x27;t care enough?
fortran77超过 5 年前
It&#x27;s always been bad, too! Back in the OS9 days, the Apple documentation was &quot;cumulative&quot;. You had to know every trick, every hidden bit and flag, back to day 1 in order to write a program.<p>It&#x27;s no better today. People who live isolated in the Mac universe have no idea how good Microsoft Visual Studio tools are, and how complete and thorough the documentation is, and how consistent the API is. You don&#x27;t have to wade through a 30 years of legacy APIs to get anything done.
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hugey010超过 5 年前
I&#x27;ve developed native iOS and Android apps professionally since 2012 and I always found their docs to be a mix of amazing - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;design&#x2F;human-interface-guidelines&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;design&#x2F;human-interface-guideline...</a>, and fairly useless - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;vision" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;vision</a>. All example code I&#x27;ve seen provided by Apple looks like a Fisher-Price® My First UIViewController toy.<p>It is my belief that the Apple iOS docs are just another barrier to developer entry; similar to their $100 yearly license, expensive hardware combined with their WYSINWYG simulator, and woeful iTunesConnect experience.<p>These barriers to entry, including the poor documentation, definitely have some interesting affects on the ecosystem. I&#x27;ve seen examples of all of these in the real world.<p><pre><code> * Experienced iOS devs have a shared trial by fire experience. * iOS salaries are slightly higher on average compared to Android. * Skilled iOS devs tend to be excellent developers in general. * Average iOS devs can be more arrogant and less likely, or less capable, of helping out in other languages and projects. (Apple framework specialist pigeonhole principle) * There is almost zero culture or standards regarding application architecture or documenting iOS apps. * Underlying &quot;older&quot; concepts like memory management have been masked, forgotten, and &#x2F; or ignored.</code></pre>
oflannabhra超过 5 年前
A couple years ago, maybe around Swift&#x27;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 &quot;Documentation Archive&quot; [0]<p>They&#x27;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 attempt at migrating some of their <i>best</i> documentation: CoreBluetooth Programming Guide, CoreImage Programming Guide, or CoreData Programming Guide [1]. These are hugely helpful documents that take a much higher level approach than just API documentation and get to the heart of the design of a framework, with helpful diagrams, etc.<p>I understand that Apple has a huge body of work regarding documentation, and that it would be unfair for us to require them to <i>never</i> deprecate any of their documentation, but at this point, we basically have header files, documents automatically generated by header files, with several large swatch of that even being undocumented [2].<p>I do think that Apple made a huge effort with SwiftUI to provide meaningful, helpful documentation at the time of the announcement [3], and I don&#x27;t want that to get lost in the discussion. Unfortunately the framework has iterated so quickly that much of it is out of date.<p>However, when Xamarin [4] independently documents some of Apple&#x27;s APIs better than Apple does... it is indeed time for a call to action.<p>This is especially sad because Apple used to have some of the best documentation ever available. I basically learned how to program through using their documentation.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;archive&#x2F;navigation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;archive&#x2F;navigation&#x2F;</a><p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;archive&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;Cocoa&#x2F;Conceptual&#x2F;CoreData&#x2F;index.html#&#x2F;&#x2F;apple_ref&#x2F;doc&#x2F;uid&#x2F;TP40001075" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;archive&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;Co...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nooverviewavailable.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nooverviewavailable.com</a><p>[3] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;swiftui" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;swiftui</a><p>[4] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;akashivskyy&#x2F;status&#x2F;1187790245804367873" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;akashivskyy&#x2F;status&#x2F;1187790245804367873</a>
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microtherion超过 5 年前
OPs criticism is definitely justified, and it makes me sad. In my opinion, the peak of Apple documentation was the new, refactored edition of &quot;Inside Macintosh&quot; in the 1990s: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Inside_Macintosh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Inside_Macintosh</a><p>Not only is there not enough information, but the documentation team goes out of their way to reorganize what documentation exists every couple of years, so outside links into the docs constantly go stale.
tempodox超过 5 年前
Apple&#x27;s developer docs have been incomplete since the introduction of OS X. I don&#x27;t expect it to get any better before hell freezes over. The article mentions that this makes it hard for newbies to learn. That&#x27;s true but my guess is that by the time those chickens come home to roost, JavaScript will be called a systems programming language.<p>Edit: Updated wording to article&#x27;s title change.
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TheKarateKid超过 5 年前
I’m surprised no one has complained about the lack of documentation for Safari, especially on iOS where special behavior is done for mobile.<p>The best I could find from Apple was several years old, and clearly not up to date as the behavior no longer functioned as documented.
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rasta78超过 5 年前
It&#x27;s unclear to me how this post made to the top when it references SwiftUI - a framework which is still in beta and shouldn&#x27;t even be brought into discussion. On the other hand, UIKit is documented about ~90% which is an insane amount and this is what most of the iOS devs are using on a day-to-day basis.
novok超过 5 年前
Apple under invests in developer tooling relative to what it does. The dev tooling teams are surprisingly small and the internal dev experience at apple for their own employees is pretty bad compared to other large tech companies. My guess partly is because of the siloed nature of the company, and they don&#x27;t sell dev tooling for &quot;money&quot;.
russellbeattie超过 5 年前
Every once in a while I think to myself, &quot;I have a problem with OSX, I think I&#x27;ll try to automate it with JavaScript for Automation (JXA)...&quot; You know the rest.<p>The astounding lack of documentation is almost amusing. It becomes an adventure of trying to convert old AppleScript examples into JS, spelunking into GitHub and StackOverflow and general trial and error until I get something to work.<p>All this said, I&#x27;d rather have functionality without documentation, than the extreme of not launching an API without proper docs.<p>The solution of course - though Apple would never do this as it&#x27;s not in their DNA - is to let devs add to their docs like PHP does. I&#x27;d be happy to add back a few examples to their site once I figured things out if that option was available to me, but right now there&#x27;s really no central place for this besides random forums or starting my own repo.
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carapace超过 5 年前
Funny meme on the wall at Google: Picture of Governor Tarkin on the Death Star captioned, &quot;Documentation? At our moment of triumph?&quot; Still makes me laugh.
lasermike026超过 5 年前
If there is a problem with Apple documentation issue a bug report. I&#x27;m not from apple but I worked in their ecosystem for some time. When you experience real problems your manager or CTO might have to get in touch with a managing director. If you go to WWDC make sure you complain directly to the guys wearing the checkered shirts. They are the ones in change. The cool thing about WWDC is that you can communicate directly with Apple developers. They will even look at your code to help.
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jrochkind1超过 5 年前
15+ years ago, Apple had some of the BEST documentation. But I agree it&#x27;s fallen precipitously.
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perfectstorm超过 5 年前
So much this. The other day i was trying to look up documentation for Swift’s KVO and i couldn’t find one. I know there’s a KVO API that accepts a closure but i just couldn’t find where it is. smh.<p>Apple used to link sample code with pretty much all the big APIs but they no longer do that. If you want to see how an API is used or see the best practices you’re better off checking stackoverflow.
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oh_hello超过 5 年前
Apple&#x27;s developer guides were amazing. I was able to read through them and become a proficient iOS developer. They are now archived and not updated. Even with experience on the platform, I now often find it hard to navigate the docs and learn major new frameworks. It is a real shame.
CalChris超过 5 年前
For a company with a capitalization of $1.123T, yeah, Apple is pretty cheap on the developer documentation.
boris超过 5 年前
Their diagnostics is pretty cool, though. How about this gem:<p><pre><code> ld: warning: ignoring file build2&#x2F;libb.u.a, building for macOS-x86_64 but attempting to link with file built for unknown-unsupported file format </code></pre> Going to steal that &quot;unknown-unsupported&quot; term for sure.
ngcc_hk超过 5 年前
Reading hundred comments and the op is about the lack of documentation. Swift is a good language to learn but api no. The discussion might explain it. But should there be one to address that issue as an ecosystem.<p>For example ask Apple to do something and let them sort that out using their employee. Or some web site (I use one particular to help me).<p>Swift is a language like lisp or clojure. You may look at its architecture etc to see whether it is built in issue (lisp is easy but its library is not, say). Or it is really just a hiring issue.<p>Or may I just ask how to address the original question if it is just language lack of good doc.
devin超过 5 年前
As someone who has only recently gotten into producing an app for iOS, I was immediately struck by the lack and quality of the docs. It’s nice to hear that I’m not alone.<p>The lack of documentation led me to feeling like I was just somehow personally missing something. I’ve been at this for awhile and the apple docs left me feeling like a junior programmer all over again. I wanted to first blame myself, but it’s become clearer to me that Apple just doesn’t care about supporting devs. That’s the theme for years now and it only seems to be getting worse. Bummer.
OliverJones超过 5 年前
Agreed this is a big problem. Sometimes sitting through a WDC tutorial video can unearth answers. But, really?<p>You know, they could call Tim O&#x27;Reilly and commission a bunch of excellent books. They have the money and Tim has the writers.
supernes超过 5 年前
Developer goodwill is not really that essential to a lifestyle accessories brand.
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meh206超过 5 年前
They&#x27;re too big to care.
catchmeifyoucan超过 5 年前
Might just be me - but I&#x27;m attracted to well formatted docs. It&#x27;s not a dealbreaker but I do appreciate when the fonts, spacing and code snippets are well thought out
gigatexal超过 5 年前
According to Marco of overcast and the ATP podcast fame the docs pertaining to the audio subsystem is really lacking.
smacktoward超过 5 年前
Apple&#x27;s just doing with documentation what they do with everything else: making it thinner at all costs.
specialist超过 5 年前
Sample code (showing usages) and tests are also part of the documentation.
ChrisMarshallNY超过 5 年前
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&#x27;s open codebases. Their code is exceptionally well-documented.<p>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, instead, based the entire interview on a 50-line binary tree test in Swift.<p>I&#x27;ll make it clear that I&#x27;m NOT a fan of these. I am mediocre, at best, at them, as I don&#x27;t come from a traditional CS background (I started as an EE).<p>In any case, during the test, I did what I always do when I write code. I stopped to write a header document for the function.<p>This was clearly not something the tester liked. Also, to add insult to injury, they dinged me for not writing a cascaded nil-coalescing operator. The code they wanted me to write was difficult to understand, and absolutely not one bit faster.<p>What makes this even funnier, was that this was for an Objective-C job, and the links that I sent them (that they ignored), were to ObjC repos.<p>After that, I just gave up on them. It kind of shows where a lot of this is coming from.<p>Dynamically-generated documentation can be great (It&#x27;s clear that the lions&#x27; share of Apple&#x27;s developer documentation is dynamically-generated), but it requires a VERY disciplined coding approach. I suspect that they may be hiring less-disciplined engineers, these days.
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non-entity超过 5 年前
I haven&#x27;t done a lot of work in Apple ecosystems, but what I have seen from their docs are admittedly pretty bad. Recently out of curiosity, I tried to figure out how macOS drivers are written and left more confused than I was before. Microsoft iirc, used to have their docs terribly organized (it was difficult for me to find what I wanted without a Google search) but they seem to have improved that nowadays
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mlang23超过 5 年前
One Cook can ruin many meals.
balls187超过 5 年前
My issue with this is that the developer is comparing his experience with Apple&#x27;s documentation over a few months, with his anecdotal experience over 4 years.<p>Part of gaining experience with a platform is the ability to source answers to technical questions effectively, including how to use official documentation effectively.
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jmull超过 5 年前
The Swift language has excellent documentation.<p>For SwiftUI, the WWDC presentations are essential, IMO, for the high-level stuff. There is basic reference documentation, but there&#x27;s no way to put it all together without a high-level understanding. It follows the patterns of some other frameworks so depending on your experience you may be able to get by without the WWDC presentations, but I&#x27;d still watch them or at least read the transcripts.<p>I think Swift Package Manager is meant as a community tool, and the love and care it needs to become excellent is not going to be coming from Apple, not without some kind of strategic change. Either the community will value it and figure out how to move it forward or it&#x27;s not going to get much better. I could be wrong -- I&#x27;m trying to judge it&#x27;s on-going strategic importance to Apple -- but I think the way it&#x27;s going to improve is through community involvement.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;m not sure what the point of this kind of rant is. Whining about Apple is an easy way to get useless internet karma points, but it&#x27;s such a bad look for a developer. At least half the job is being the one who finally deals with things someone else probably should have already dealt with but didn&#x27;t.
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