CocoaDocs - Documentation for iOS Libraries | Hacker News Reader

CocoaDocs - Documentation for iOS Libraries

cocoadocs.org

80 pointsorta30 comments

Hey guys & gals, I created cocoadocs to try and fill a gap in the iOS ecosystem. It's a site that acts similar to rubydocs in that it gets the latest cocoapods libraries and documents them using a custom flavour of appledoc. I'm planning on adding support for Xcode and Dash over the next few weeks to make it even easier to use!

I've been experimenting with adding Github search links for methods and properties too - so you can get context on their uses ( this has them when you mouse over further down the page: http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/AFIncrementalStore/0.4.0/Classe... )

If you provide a /search?query=%s endpoint I would build an Alfred V2 Workflow for it. Downloading the whole documents.jsonp file each time is slow.

I'd love to but ATM its a static site hosted on s3, so no API at all. Moving to something which is API / Client is within my next major move, at that point it will be super easy.

Just having a HTML doc with a meta refresh from the distribution to the latest version would make a lot of things easier.

IE have http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/NUI/ Redirects to: http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/NUI/0.2.7/

This would enable http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/%s shortcuts

Orta already made an issue for this in the CocoaDocs repo :)

Looks great! Only one thing, how often is it updated? I pushed a new Podspec to the master repo about 5 days ago for one of my projects (http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/Colours/0.0.1/) and it should be v1.0.1. Just wondering if you are doing live grabbing of the data or have it cached somewhere?

Cached for the moment, I'm wrapping up the CI server which will be constantly updating podspecs from this week onwards.

This is fantastic. Great work… I will be adding this to my repertoire of resources.

Nice! I have a "pod" in the Cocoa Pods repository and the documentation has been reproduced faithfully!

I like how you pull the github README to use at the documentation landing page.

Fantastic! I can see this being incredibly useful for cases where you have multiple versions of a framework used in different projects. Right now you can install documentation into Xcode if the project uses appledoc[1], but there's no way to switch between versions.

On the subject of appledoc, are you using a custom template here? It seems to improve on the default one in a few places.

[1]: http://gentlebytes.com/appledoc/

If you use Cocoapods, when you install with Appledoc it names the documentation based on versions, e.g. TTTAttributedLabel 1.6.2 so you can keep multiple sets.

Of course, that gets messy real fast, so it's good that CocoaDocs is an option.

Wow I didn't know about that, that's really handy.

Brilliant!

Suggestion: I would love to see the full list of available pods (not just search) with short description next to them somewhere.

Thanks, this is really easy to do as right now cocoadocs generates a jsonp file of every cocoapod: http://cocoadocs.org/documents.jsonp - so whilst ATM I'm not planning on doing this, someone can do it very easily.

Like this? http://www.cocoacontrols.com/cocoapods :)

Very cool!

This should follow the doc build rules set up in each pod. For example, I maintain MapBox and have a number of specific documentation directives:

https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-ios-sdk/blob/release/MapBox...

I should, I just closed the issue an hour ago about this after looking through the repository and only finding your library and 2-3 others as a spec with meaningful appledoc options. I'll re-open it for my next deploy.

That is great! Didn't know my lib is so well documented ;)

Not gonna plug your lib? :)

Awesome.. Now if only contributors helped with adding documentation to some of my classes..

Doesn't have anything on AvFoundation. That's kind of my litmus test.

What? I'm pretty sure that CocoaDocs is for projects on CocoaPods, i.e. not Apple provided libraries.

AVFoundation is an apple library, which isn't on cocoapods meaning cocoadocs doesn't support it. Apple do their own documentation pretty well and I don't really see a need to duplicate that to be honest.

They do provide great docs.

But if you're solving a find-ability the drop down list could either include those results or provide a redirect. This would just be an easy workflow thing.

Also, you're attempting to reflect the rubydocs ecosystem. An ecosystem which includes (core and stdlib) and gems. If you're reflecting that system accurately, you should include apple docs, and pods accordingly.

Just my two cents.

I agree, I think redirecting to apple's libraries is a great idea! When the grand-parent said a lack of AVFoundation was a problem, I interpreted that as "you should document that" but I think linking to all of Cocoa/UIKit is a real useful feature. Thanks 1qaz2wsx3edc.

Ah I see. It wasn't clear (to me at least) that this wasn't meant to be globally inclusive. My initial take was that you were trying to make a better overall docs system for Obj-c. Having links back to the current definitive Apple docs would be great.

AVFoundation is a library provided by Apple. CocoaDocs documents third party libraries published through the CocoaPods (http://cocoapods.org/) tool.

Err, this is about CocoaPods. You can go to ADC for AVFoundation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com