On Apple’s Piss-Poor Documentation
Casey Liss (tweet, Hacker News, Slashdot):
For the last year or two, I’ve come to realize that the number one thing that makes it harder for me to do my job is documentation. Or, more specifically, the utter dearth of documentation that Apple provides for its platforms.
[…]
The march of progress doesn’t help, either. As my friend Adam Swinden pointed out to me on Twitter, as old APIs get deprecated, often times the new ones can’t be bothered to include documentation. Check out the difference between this API and the one that replaces it.
The number one thing for me is APIs that simply don’t work, but documentation is probably number two.
Previously:
3 Comments RSS · Twitter
If things stayed stable a while, it might be worth reverse engineering the beast and writing good 3rd party documentation but at the rate everything is being deprecated it's an exercise in masochism.
The number one thing for me is APIs that are kept private (eg, Touch Bar, Spaces). I mean, for crying out loud, how many years have we had Spaces and still not API? After that, APIs not working reliably. Then documentation.
But at least StackOverflow can generally resolve the documentation issues. If only we could fix the broken and private APIs…
In the old days we gave Apple a free pass because Apple didn't have resources to do all of this. But having said that Documentation was still better than what we have now.
Now it is just sloppiness.
