A couple days ago I decided that it was time to look into all this Objective-C 2.0 stuff that came with my Apple computer. I love a chance to learn a new programming language, and to see what it can do. (no geek jokes!) So I started by booting up XCode (Apples development tool that comes with every apple computer), and pulling up some of the help documentation.
I was initial extremely impressed by the shear quantity of documentation that Apple included with XCode. Normally you would only expect to see some help stuff for using the tools, not the language. In this case, there was sample code, tutorials and more. More Importantly, they had class references and such for everything, the type of documentation a non-novice developer can make use of. This type of documentation is often overlooked.
Later that day, I was sitting in a Chapters (a Canadian book store) and didn’t have access to the Internet. Not needing anything but the tutorial walkthrough, I started building my application. It turns out that all this amazing documentation was for the previous version of XCode (and Objective-C). It was telling me to press buttons and select options that weren’t there. Some of them weren’t even close. I wasted hours trying to fight my way through the documentation. It wasn’t just misplaced buttons either. The Garbage collection feature that was just released with Objective-C 2.0 kept “cleaning†my window. Without realizing that the documentation was so out of date. I thought I was doing something wrong. If it was missing all together I would have waited till I got home, and found a newer Internet tutorial (which is what I finally did).
Apple scores big points for have a huge amount of documentation at your finger tips, but loses points for it being out of date. Sometimes misinformation is worse than no information.
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Do you have any stories with bad documentation? Any interesting experiences trying to learn a new language? Leave a comment:
Tags: Apple, Objective-c 2.0
It clearly would have been a good idea for apple to indicate which version the documentation is for and state in the updated environment that the existing documentation hasn’t caught up yet.
Forest what tutorial did you find? I’d be interested in checking that out.
Hey Justin,
In the “Welcome to XCode” window, I clicked “sample code”, then “Cocoa”, then “Getting started”.
ADC Home > Reference Library > Guides > Tools > Xcode > Cocoa Application Tutorial
This path sounds complicated, but it is the obvious direction you go when looking for documentation on Cocoa (Cocoa is the interface API I used with Objective-C):
I hope this helps.
The newer version of the exact same tutorial can be found at http://tinyurl.com/6pb6dz It’s a good tutorial if you get the right version