Thursday, May 27, 2021

Apple Developer Forums Now Have RSS

Apple (MacRumors):

Search for content across multiple tags.

[…]

Upload images to your question or answer to provide supporting visual details.

[…]

Subscribe to RSS feeds for tags you’re interested in.

I’m glad to have image and RSS support, but the way it’s done is pretty frustrating. You can’t subscribe to the whole forum, only to individual tags. This is extra work to set up, and you’ll miss posts if a new tag is introduced. It also means that if a post has multiple tags it will appear duplicated in your feed reader. At first it looks like there’s no page that lists all the tags. You can only view them 15 at a time, which is lots of pages for 561 tags. Eventually I found a link in the forum help to a page listing all the tags. Nearly half of the main page’s width is devoted to showing a list of only 5 trending tags. There’s still no mailing list mode. I’m not sure whether external links are still banned.

There are no RSS feed on a member’s profile, so you can’t follow known high-signal posters like Quinn. He does, however, have a list of favorite improvements, mainly to the Markdown support.

Previously:

Update (2021-06-05): Craig Hockenberry:

It looks like the Apple Developer Forums changes include being able to link to resources on other websites!

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

That is why complaining is good. After 10 years of complete neglect.

I hate to say it, but I've basically gotten to the point where I don't even want to try new features on Apple products, even for things I really like, like RSS.

My default assumption with Apple is that if they add a new feature I actually like and use, they'll sacrifice it to make the interface "cleaner" and "more beautiful" as soon as I incorporate it into my daily workflow.

I feel like I am Charlie Brown, and Apple is Lucy holding the football.

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