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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

A Cocoa oldtimer on #macdev argued with me when I pointed out that it's hard to find good resources for Cocoa dev. It's so bad that I sometimes try to repurpose iOS dev resources (like Youtube videos) for Cocoa dev.

They said that was nonsense, that I have to be expected to do some reading instead of being spoonfed (which isn't what I was asking for, it was pure condescension), and linked me to this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/

> and every time anyone complains about Electron and wonders why nobody wants to build native apps anymore... this is a huge factor why

Exactly.

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The most frustrating thing is when the docs have that "this document is no longer maintained. Please see /documentation/whatever for the latest version" but when you go the link it ends up just linked back to the place you came from. I guess that means the unmaintained stuff is still current? I don't know though because it's still all Objective-C, so I have no idea what the current best practice is supposed to look like. For a trillion dollar company it's kind of annoying that they can't hire somebody to do the docs. For MacOS dev there are basically no third party resources either. The last book is from Swift 3. It's better than nothing, but not much.

The "this document is no longer maintained" notice is on everything that's no longer being updated regardless of whether or not there's actually a replacement. Sometimes it's actually still up to date, sometimes it's out of date and there's something else you should be looking at, and sometimes it's just plain out of date and the only newer source of information is a WWDC session from two years ago.

What made Apple think it was okay to abandon their documentation, just decide not to update it without a replacement?

Insufficient pushback from developers?

due to the fact that they simply have no choice but to use apple dev tools. Or at least that was true on iOS until recently.

That, plus the fact that Apple having a monopoly on the store relieve them from any kind of pressure, because no matter how the dev feels about it, they’re going to give 30% commission to apple.

Give them a break, they're a small, resource-constrained company.

I came across the EXACT same thing. I just wanted to do something as simple as “give me an actual core dump instead of a crash report in Console.app”

Found some obsolete docs and they linked back to themselves. It’s absolutely unacceptable. Man pages are better, except Apple’s often don’t cover their weird, uncommon behaviors.

FYI, there is a Swift 5 book available now.

In the late 90s, Apple's Developer Documentation (for different products of course) was truly exemplar.

Old timers may not realize how far it's fallen/not kept up.

I remember reading it like a book and at the end I had a really good idea how things work. MS documentation was also quite good if you had the MSDN CDs.

Yep. Not just API level documentation (not just), but narrative overviews explaining the concepts and models and how everything went together. With just the right amount of example code.

I learned what good developer documentation could be from it!

Apple really does need to get on top of this. It’s easy for old timers to miss as in general you stop looking at things like the programming guides and end up straight to the class reference which generally is still ok. But one of the things about Apple’s stack is that it is built on a lot of years and layers of and is generally not as approachable for someone just starting.

The docs like the programming guides and the framework overview docs really help with getting your head around why things work the way they do. I’d even say that a lot of the frameworks are built with the idea that you have read them. Most developers I know who worked with obj-c and OS X really loved the cleanliness and care spent on this aspect.

I don’t know if they are trying to outsource this work to save a little money or if it’s just neglect but the end result is going to hurt them in the long run.

Don't feel bad about it, if you did.

I launched a combo macOS/iOS app last year and wrote (yet-another...) framework to bridge the gap between AppKit/UIKit. There's an insane number of minute differences, even with Apple trying to make it better behind the scenes (e.g, NSCollectionView _can_ have a similar API to UICollectionView, but it's really not the same beast - it's much easier to tank performance on it).

Apple has, IMO, hands down the best UI framework(s) outside the web platform, and they're outright crippling them by what they're doing here. The AppKit community also needs to do their part and not be so resistive to modernizing how it's all learned.

tl;dr it sucks.

There are barely any Cocoa courses or books that have been updated. All the learning industry is focused on iOS now.

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