Monday, May 20, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Scott Anguish:

It appears that most of the old iOS conceptual documents have been moved to the documentation archive and are now unsupported. Is there really no iOS Text Programming concepts? Or are the indexes just that bad? That is more than a decade of work by dozens, just being abandoned. I can’t even grasp how that’s any solution. If this is the case every single iOS developer should be screaming from the rafters. It’s by far the stupidest move I’ve seen in a decade. You can’t write apps without authoritative docs. It’s bad enough the reference doc has reached the point it has.

It’s surprising how much of the documentation is marked as legacy, archived, not up-to-date, or was never written in the first place. At first I thought this was because of some sort of internal transition, but it’s been going on for years now and does not seem to be getting any better.

Steve Tibbett:

As far as I can tell, this is the only documentation on IAP receipt validation. This is part of a current system that’s making Apple billions of dollars. There are errors in it, and it’s “no longer being updated”.

Martin Pilkington:

Fun fact: when I was looking up docs for Help Books for my Appreciating AppKit post, one of the few Mac features already supported in Marzipan, it took ages to find as they’re only available in the documentation archive

Matt Stevens:

If you’re struggling to find an Apple developer document you know exists, it’s not just you. http://developer.apple.com’s robots.txt disallows /library/archive/, where all of the old docs now live. Apple’s own “Search Documentation Archive”…doesn’t search the archive.

Previously:

I remember the good old days when people were annoyed that you couldn’t figure out Cocoa bindings without the stuff mmalc posted on his personal website. That was nothing compared to when the doc browser turned into a lousy webpage instead of Cocoa views and Search Kit.

Randy Scovil:

I’m wondering how much has really disappeared. I used to point students there all the time for source code examples and now I find most any search for those comes up empty. Que?

Jonathan Fischer:

For what it’s worth, DuckDuckGo seems to be ignoring that robots.txt entry for /library/archive. I usually find what I’m looking for without much trouble:

Francisco Tolmasky:

Died Apple just not document AppKit anymore? I can’t find anything about NSWindowTab. Is all information just in like WWDC videos?

See also: Hacker News.

X0R:

Sad but true. 10 years ago when I were starting to learn iOS development it was one of the best documentations I’ve ever worked with. And now it’s more like Microsoft’s in it’s dark age.

One of my biggest issues with the new docs page is discoverability. And yes, I’ve filed radars on it.

Kyle Howells:

This is now my number one WWDC wishlist item. Anything else is a bonus, but Apple’s documentation has fallen so far the knowledge about how the platform works is now being buried in archived documents, old WWDC videos and release notes.

Apple’s developer documentation doesn’t show what class the method I’m looking at is for anywhere on the page.

From comments on your post today “Apple’s docs turned downhill fast when they switched to automatically generating docs instead of using human-written, structured, and curated materials.” Except that’s not what happened. It’s all human-written, structured, and curated.

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