ADC Documentation Bomb

March 8th, 2006

Apple’s documentation team just keeps getting better and better. Not only is the writing clearer and more connected to real-world applications than it has been in the past, the team seems to be getting prolific! Today they dropped a huge update on their site, including a bunch of brand new titles.

The completely new documents:

  • Cocoa Fundamentals Guide – This looks like a new “first stop” document for developers just coming to the platform. But perhaps more importantly for the rest of us, it contains a chapter completely dedicated to Design Patterns and how they relate to Cocoa. Sweet hallelujah! Many developers have been waiting a long time for documentation like this to start coming out of Apple.
  • Cocoa Drawing Guide – This appears to tackle many of the details about how one goes about exposing the advanced facilities of Quartz through a Cocoa-based application. The Advanced Drawing Techniques appears likely to eliminate a lot of mailing list confoundedness. Hopefully the fact that this document shipped with “Alpha Draft – Confidential” at the bottom doesn’t mean it was a mistaken release.
  • View Programming Guide for Cocoa – It just keeps getting better! This one discusses the high-learning-curve tasks associated with creating a custom view in Cocoa, and again includes an “Advanced” section as well as an “Optimization” section for those “wish I could chat with an expert” moments.
  • Scroll View Programming Guide for Cocoa – It may seem strange to find this new document in the midst of others with much larger scope, but I can see how this will come as a great relief to people who have beat their heads against their keyboards while trying to get scroll views to behave as expected. In particular, the concepts discussed in synchronized scroll views should help a lot of people out.

And one major update:

  • Cocoa Scripting Guide – Apparently the result of a merge and rewrite of two previous scripting documents. As anybody who has added scripting support to an application knows, more documentation is always welcomed.

Exciting times. Thanks for the update, Apple!

9 Responses to “ADC Documentation Bomb”

  1. Andy Lee Says:

    Thanks for the heads-up. Sounds great!

  2. Andy Kim Says:

    Oooh, tasty.

  3. James Lee Says:

    100% Cocoa, 0% Carbon
    Very disappointing

  4. Andy Bob Says:

    100% English, 0% Esperanto
    Very disappointing

  5. Jack Nutting Says:

    Umm… I just did a quick count. There are 69 new or updated documents from March 8. 22 of them have Carbon listed in the “Topic” column, and 33 listed Cocoa. How does that work out to 100% Cocoa or 0% Carbon?

  6. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    Presumably because 0% of the “Completely New” documents are Carbon. My opinion is this should be taken as a sign by people who insist that Carbon is the future of Mac programming. I doubt very much we’ll be seeing much “completely new” stuff for Carbon.

  7. Marc Driftmeyer Says:

    (Assuming he’s referring to the new guides being Cocoa only)

    100% Cocoa: Excellent!
    0% Carbon: Get used to disappointment. Move to Cocoa.

  8. glasspusher Says:

    Don’t think Carbon gets all the second hand treatment. I’m waiting for Leopard for Cocoa to have APIs to select files based on UTIs. File extensions suck and should be strictly optional. The Carbon folks are ahead of the curve on this one. Ditto for Applescript support, although Cocoa has been getting better with regards to this.

    I use them both. I love Cocoa but it doesn’t have everything. A little rivalry isn’t a bad thing.

  9. GI Says:

    It remind me the work made with the ‘Concept’ Books 15 years ago for NeXTSTEP

    Regards

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