There's a huge debate going on right now on Apple's Cocoa list (archives on Cocoabuilder) about the suitability of the current developer documentation for Cocoa and Objective-C.

Today I threw my assessment into the ring with all the others. See below:

The documentation debate is actually several orthogonal debates that regularly get intermingled:

* What should the purpose of the documentation be?

* How should it achieve those goals?

* Who should be responsible for it?

The answers to these questions used to be easy because of the scale of the problem: small. As Apple grows, as its software base grows, as its customer base grows, and as its developer community grows, so does the diversity of all of those and difficulties and vocal minorities with those difficulties appear.

An area where Apple has proved itself to be a master in its *products* is that of managing expectations. Only by managing expectations is it possible to consistently satisfy and delight customers. But we're not debating products here, we're debating *developer documentation* and that's not a product. Or maybe it is? I argue that it is not because if it were then Apple would be managing it like one and is clearly not. If it were, then the three questions above would have answers and we would all know and understand them. It is notable that for the iPhone SDK announcement there was a live public demo of Apple's developer tools -- a milestone event -- so maybe the path to the productization of the documentation is coming.

To add fuel to the multiple fires here:
 
Erik Buck wrote:

"Cocoa is the most consistent, elegant, and productive software development technology I have ever used, and I have used a lot.  Cocoa uses key metaphors and design patterns ubiquitously.  If the programmer is either unaware of the metaphors or  does not see their utility, it will be difficult to use Cocoa.  If a programmer fails to grasp a particular pattern, the whole framework may be incomprehensible because the pattern is most likely used throughout."

Many of those with difficulties know and understand this. It's the best thing since sliced bread and they want to learn, badly. They quickly find that the Cocoa way is not the same as the Java or C way, and while there are a small number who will simply complain that it is unfamiliar and do nothing about it, the majority just see it as another thing they need to grok. Programmers have one thing in common: they want to be productive. Those learning ObjC/Cocoa are doing it because they want to be productive and they believe that mastery will make them greatly productive.

"The attributes of Cocoa that make it so consistent and elegant are exactly the same attributes that I think newbies are complaining about.  The newbie complains that the reference documentation mentions delegates or tags or data sources or the responder chain or key value coding or bindings or targets or actions etc. without defining them".

But the documentation actually *defines* them very well. What the documentation does not do is to justify the existence of these things, explain the problems that they solve, put them into context, relate them to the user's situation, reassure the reader how much they need to know right now to get to the next step, etc. It does all of these things *in places* and to different degrees, but not consistently and not enough. The environment is hostile to learning.

"This is exactly like  a newbie complaining that clicking and dragging and selecting and double clicking are used throughout a GUI but not explained in the documentation for every application.  Once the GUI metaphors are internalized, it is unnecessary at best and annoying at worst to keep encountering mouse based selection explained in every user's guide.  The consistent application of the metaphors makes the GUI easy to use.  The consistent use of metaphors makes Cocoa easy to program. BUT YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THE METAPHORS FIRST in both cases."

And this is precisely why there used to be sections in computer manuals on mouse usage, hierarchical file systems, etc., all unfamiliar concepts to many of the users. But there are *no such sections* in Apple's docs. Should there be?

No really, I can't find them. Here I am in Xcode's docs and I'm typing in Concepts, Conceptual into the search box, and any way I try it I don't find any conceptual docs except Core Foundation Design Concepts (now three years old). And if I go to the developer site and find my way to http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/, there is nothing labeled "conceptual". Let's try the pop-up on that page: Jump To: No concepts.

But the idea of conceptual documents *really is* there. The document Introduction to Cocoa Bindings Programming Topics has the following path: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaBindings/CocoaBindings.html. It's in the *Conceptual* folder so I know that conceptual documents exist here as a concept at least. Now show me all the conceptual docs in one place so I can learn the concepts!

Now *I* know that the Guides fill a conceptual role, and Getting Started With Cocoa tells me to go see the Guides for conceptual information. But when I actually go there practically salivating with anticipation, it's organized by *Topic*, not by Concept. Show me the concepts!

Let's try a global text search at the developer site: 8600 documents show up, and I meet Core Foundation documents before I meet Cocoa. "Cocoa Concepts" does somewhat better with 1500 documents, but still. Where do I start? How about Core Data, that shows up near the front and sounds pretty conceptual....

Am I looking in the wrong place? For the wrong thing? How would I ever know if I'm starting out?

Perception is everything. If the newbie perceives that it's all screwed up then it *really is*. It doesn't matter if *you* learned Cocoa from reading the backs of cereal boxes. *You* are not the typical Cocoa learner. And this is key and why the docs need fixing: Almost nobody here is a typical Cocoa learner, because at least 90% of the typical Cocoa learners have not yet even arrived in Cocoaland. 

On May 18, 2008, at 4:33 AM, Julius Guzy wrote:

"The very good , interesting and informative debate in this list concerning the accessibility of the programming environment to new users has it seems to me incresingly polarised between those who think the documentation more or less adequate and those like me who for whatever reason, have great difficulties making use of the facilities."

Here is an example of the difficulty. Go to the Cocoa section of the Core Reference Library. Click on Fundamentals (Essential information for developers using Objective-C) and select Memory Management Programming Guide. I'm playing the part of a good newbie here -- clicking on everything that claims it is fundamental, essential, and core to the whole thing. By being here I am told that memory management is fundamental, essential, and core, and the document reinforces that. The first thing it says is:

"Memory management, especially as it concerns Objective-C programs, is an important subject. Some of the more common problems encountered by novice application developers derive from poor memory management. Cocoa provides mechanisms and a policy to assist you in the proper creation, retention, and disposal of objects." 

Wonderful! I am in the right place. The docs are doing their job. But in the second section I find that:

"Cocoa does not use garbage collection. You must do your own memory management through reference counting."

Really? I'm sure that garbage collection was in here somewhere, that was one of the reasons I wanted to learn Cocoa all of a sudden. And then later on, there is a whole section on Core Foundation memory management, talk of retain cycles, NIB files, data sources, weak references, and the like. Whaaaaaaa?? If this is the fundamental stuff, what do the tricky bits look like?

The individual developer documents are of very high quality, and this particular document is no exception. It is well-structured, complete, consistent, has many references to other documents, stresses the importance of important things, shows simple examples, describes common errors, has good readable English, etc. Some of the developer docs I have read are truly exceptional, describing very difficult material very precisely and very clearly, so it's not a lack of writing skill or the ability to explain complex things.

So what is wrong?

1. This document that I believe to be fundamental, essential, core, and important *does not stand on its own* and so robs me of understanding.

2. It is at least five times too long and contains material that while fundamental, is not fundamental to *my learning as a newbie*.

3. It has not been designed as a learning tool. If it had then it would be goal-oriented and as a learner I would be able to measure achievement by reaching that goal. I would then have confidence that my task was complete and would tackle the next fundamental item.

4. It has not met my expectations

The last point is the most important one. For whatever reason I expected to be able to learn from the documentation and it was only when I tried to do that and failed were my expectations dashed. *As a product* the documentation fails for this one fundamental reason. If I were here because I had somehow missed the huge Learn Cocoa Here banner on the developer site and clicked in the wrong place, then it would be my fault (or I had continued past the banner that told me not to learn here). But there is no such banner and no such material, and so I have every reason to believe that I can learn here.

While the documents themselves are very good, I believe that the architectural problem is that the *documentation* is not. That is, as a body of work, it is on the verge of no longer meeting the needs of developers. That's because the nature of developers themselves has changed, and the current documentation organization does not scale. Apple's own product success (iPhone!) and ease of use sets a very high expectation bar for new developers too.

It is also worth noting that many (most?) younger developers expect (demand?) an agile approach to learning new languages, environments, and concepts. Maybe Cocoa is not like that and can never be like that, but this is the expectation that Apple faces. A Google search for "agile cocoa" yields no Agile books (but at least does lead to Fraser Speirs).

"I think this debate relates to the same concerns and battles we had, and in many cases are still having about computer usability, namely the effective design of human-computer interfaces, aka HCI.

It is ironic that we are having this debate within an Apple programmer's mailing list. Apple has been celebrated for the usability of its machines and long may it continue to be so. However, Apple has been less celebrated for the humanity of its programming interface having, in my experience of Macs from the Lisa onwards, seemingly taken the attitude that its programmers were hobbyists, geeks essentially, who because of their enthusiasm would successfully negociate their way into the machine's innards. That said, the 9 tomes of "Inside the Macintosh" documentation of the programmer's workshop were pretty good once you got into them but there was a lot less to get into then than there is today"

It's a scaling problem. That fundamental memory management document above covers a lot of ground out of necessity  (in order to be complete in the face of scaling) but in doing so covers too much ground (in the face of scaling of readership and hence the diversity of reader backgrounds).

"This question of volume of documentation and system size and complexity is significant to our debate. It is pertinent to quote what one of the great programming pioneers, Dijkstra said about PL/1: That it " must be like flying a plane with 7,000 buttons, switches, and handles to manipulate in the cockpit. I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language - our basic tool, mind you! - already escapes our intellectual control". ("Humble Programmer", see Prgramming Methodology 1978).

Well I think that the sheer size and complexity of Cocoa et al comes close to being an aeroplane cockpit and one which we are largely expected to learn to use from engineering manuals essentially concerned with listing the identity, composition and location of components,(not to mention the various incarnations of Xcode and Interface Builder). I am not saying that tremendous pains have not been taken to create a robust coherent system nor to document it. There have. Also there are many who have succeeded in mastering the system. Some will have done so through having grown up with it from early days, others will have had the fortune to attend (expensive) traning courses, and others still will have done so through dint of talent, perspicacity and hours of hard work. So mastery is possible. But I am not stupid nor a shirker nor a complete novice and I expect that the same can be said for most people who have had and are continuing to have horrendous dificulties in getting to use the system. It is clear that the programing interface to the Mac has serious usability issues."

It's not the programming interface that has difficulty. It really is extremely good and very well thought out. Every time I do something the "right" way I end up with less code and understand a little more of how smart the people were who created all this in the first place.

It just doesn't look so good to those who don't understand why it is like it is. There are some similar arguments to this one about the interface to Blender, the 3D modeling and animation application. It's hell to start with (three button mouse? you must be kidding...), but much later you realize why it all makes sense because the enormous complexity you would otherwise face at that later point is so much more manageable than with other apps. Experienced Blender users are amazingly productive *and* they can keep up with the rapid scaling of the platform because of its conceptual underpinnings. The Blender docs are another matter though...

"I cannot help touting one recent example. To specify the outlets etc between a class definition and Interface Builder on Leopard we are told to type the name of the class into a field and that thereafter IB will make the appropriate links with Xcode. It took me ten minutes of doing it this way and that before I realised that IB would only make the connections AFTER one had typed in the class name AND saved IB! We know from HCI research that it is little things like this which most frequently cause users to give up and never touch the equipment again."

Exactly. Conceptually, saving triggers the connection and makes the magic happen. But how is that concept learned? Where is the metaphor? Why is saving even needed?

"Now, of course, as programmers we are well used to wasting hours hacking through the underbrush to discover that to switch on the machine we need to hold down Alt-Escape with the right hand whilst depressing a button round the back of the machine with the left. (That was how in the 70s one turned on some of the PCs at Leicester Poly!). But what a waste of time and effort and how demoralising and off-putting to anyone but the most obstinate programmer. I deferred having a go at Cocoa for about three or four years because I knew it would be a struggle and these last five months or is it six have been horrorshow.Let me state two principal facts.
1. Designing good user interfaces is hard.
2. Designing good user interfaces is expensive.

It is hard because every human being is an individual,
because there is seemingly a lot to learn
and because there are limits to the complexity we can handle.
It is expensive because the design of good HCI is primarily an empirical activity centered on user testing"

Perception is everything! 

We have right here the results of some user testing and yet those results are not being accepted as valid. Why is that?

"The question is then whether we and possibly apple should do anything about it"

Let's look at the issues again, partition them the way I think they should be, and throw in some answers:

* What should the purpose of the documentation be?

To hook beginners, to teach learners, and to support experts. These three different goals require mutually exclusive techniques and tools, but currently there appears to only be one big classroom and one textbook at Cocoa School.

* How should it achieve those goals?

Reward beginners with their concrete understanding; reward learners with their concrete code; reward experts with their concrete profit.

* Who should be responsible for it?

Ultimately it must be Apple because they control the code. They don't have to write the material themselves, but they must find a way make it possible for the material to exist and be found. There is no "Apple Press". There is little to no investment in a writing community that could fill in the gaps. There is no structure into which additional material can fit in a rational fashion, although there is all sorts of material out there that we stumble across. 

Jason Stephenson wrote:

"I also don't find any great difficulty in using Apple's documentation. The conceptual documents cover the concepts, and the reference documentation serves as a reference. No, I don't think you should learn to use Cocoa just from the conceptual documents, but I'm sure it is possible.

The simple fact of the matter is that documentation, just like a GUI, cannot be all things to all people. Programmers and those interested in programming are a particularly eclectic bunch. We each come at Cocoa for the first time with different experience, different reference points, and different expectations. One set of documentation cannot be expected to handle all of the possible permutations of programmer knowledge and experience. For this reason, other books exist written by third parties to cover those gaps or target different audiences."

Agreed. So what about third party books? Surely everyone is expected to go buy a book and use that. Well, not everyone does these days, since the web has taken over much of the world's publishing. But let's give the developer docs a chance and see what is recommended. Go to Getting Started With Cocoa at http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/GettingStarted/GS_Cocoa/ and look at Start Here. There surely cannot possibly be a better place to start! There are two book links:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596003012/ leads me to a book published five years ago.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596002350/ leads me to another book published five years ago.

And the other books on the page are of the same vintage.

You see the disconnect -- we all know that this is not how the great Cocoa books are found, yet here it is in the docs. Apple's documentation is not integrating well with other resources, and worse, maintenance appears to be falling behind somewhat. This is not a tenable position. Just as a city gets run down area by area, not noticed or lived in by those who could foster change, documentation, especially documentation on this scale fails in the same way with the new users in the slums. 

Why this situation?

Jason Stephenson also wrote:

"In summary, I think it is a problem of all programming documentation and programming interface regardless of the platform or language, and I don't really see a way for a single vendor to resolve the issue, not do I think they really should"

But since Apple is the de facto owner of Objective-C and the actual owner of Cocoa, there is no alternative! 

The allocated resources at Apple are just not sufficient for the current task. It's not that the problems are not known or fretted about, it's a matter of priority. We and everyone else can debate and complain as much as we like, but no lasting changes will occur until this particular user interface is viewed on a par with the consumer user interface and dealt the resources commensurate with its importance.

Tags: Apple, Cocoa, Xcode, Documentation, Writing, Objective-C

While publishing my book Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5 I figured out how to create high-quality page thumbnails like the one above. It is almost possible to read the body text, and the small blue title is certainly readable: Importing Images From A Single Folder, even though the characters are tiny. The word Images is only 5 by 19 pixels.

I first tried taking screen shots and reducing the images in Photoshop, but that resulted in a horrible loss of detail and a very fuzzy look. The page size reduction was being carried out as though it were a photograph, not a page of text. I needed a way of maintaining the character information through the size reduction.

To create the high quality page thumbnails I printed the pages I needed to a PDF file:

Then viewing the generated page in Preview, reduced the page size until it was what I needed:

Since the PDF was being rendered at the reduced size, the detail was still present. Last, I took a screenshot with SnapzPro2 and added a thin border and drop shadow with the media inspector in RapidWeaver:

This also gives me an image with the drop shadow rendered in: I just click and drag the image from the published web page to my desktop.

Tags: Thumbnails, PDF, Get Your Head Around Aperture, Books, Documentation, RapidWeaver, Screen Shots, Photoshop

The Nerd Handbook is a short guide to the care and feeding of your nerd (or geek):

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that”. We’ll explore the consequences of this seemingly short attention span in a bit, but for now this project is the other big thing your nerd is building and I’ve no idea what is, but you should.

At some point, you, the nerd’s companion, were the project. You were showered with the fire hose of attention because you were the bright and shiny new development in your nerd’s life. There is also a chance that you’re lucky and you are currently your nerd’s project. Congrats. Don’t get too comfortable because he’ll move on, and, when that happens, you’ll be wondering what happened to all the attention. This handbook might help.

He nails it. Be sure to read the comments. And maybe buy the book Managing Humans.

Tags: Nerds, Documentation

Scott Stevenson has posted Part 2 of his series on Objective-C 2.0. He covers public properties and private setters, custom accessor and variable names, mixing synthesized and custom accessors, and providing methods at runtime.

It's all good stuff -- both the features in Objective-C 2.0 and Scott's presentation of the material.

Tags: Leopard, Cocoa, Programming, Documentation

A couple of sites now have examples of coding under Leopard: a quick Objective-C 2.0 tutorial from Scott Stevenson, a bound NSCollectionView from Kevin Hoffman.

A good place to start exploring what's new in Leopard development is in the release notes at the Leopard dev center. You'll need an ADC membership to get it, but now the free membership works.

Tags: Leopard, Programming, Documentation

Verity Stob writes about the quality of documentation on the Microsoft Developer Network in an article entitled Unhelpful Microsoft help denies helpless millions help. It's all about one function: LockWindowUpdate and how effectively its real purpose is omitted from the information available from Microsoft:


I have actively avoided writing anything for Windows. The documentation for Mac OS X is really very good and very available, and that is one of the reasons I have gotten into programming again.

Tags: Microsoft, Documentation

Writing Random Wok and other code is always a very punctuated experience. I decide what to implement next, then read and take notes, then figure out what I think I need to do, then write the code, then debug, then blog. Sometimes a lot of time is spent during the reading and figuring out stages as I try to understand either how something is done, or, knowing how it is done, trying to understand how to do it that way in my code.

I go to several offline and online resources to get my curiosity satisfied, my brain overloaded, and my questions answered. Here is a short list of where I go, in order of attack:

1. XCode's Built-in Help and Documentation

My first stop is XCode, Apple's IDE for Cocoa development. XCode has a great deal of information built in: more than a gigabyte of Reference Library, in fact. Access to it all is via XCode's Help menu:

The documentation for XCode itself is found via the XCode Help item. The full developer reference library opens in a viewing window via Documentation:

The documentation window has two modes of searching. If you don't know how these work you will not find things and be very confused. Access the modes by clicking on the magnifying glass:

API search is immediate and needs no carriage return. The window below the search box shows the matches in order of fit. Click on one and I have the document in the lower pane. Double click and it opens in a separate window.

Full-Text Search is not immediate. I must press carriage return for anything to happen. And then the scope of the search is controlled by the selection in the library browser on the left:

My search for NSNull will only be carried out for documentation on Carbon in this case. I have to leave the Reference Library line at the top selected if I want to see all the documents (as I normally do).

The help menu also has two search items that work on selected text. Find selected text in documentation and Find selected text in API reference. An option double click on a word also takes me to Find selected text in API reference. I use this all the time.

Another very handy shortcut is to command double click on a word. That takes me to the definition in the code. This can be very useful because the context and comments in the code can often tell more than the documentation:

I set the languages that are searched via the Configure Options button on the toolbar:

I don't do C++ or Java and this prevents anything about them from showing up. Updates come out periodically. I have auto-checking enabled in the preferences:

So that I get update notifications:

And when a new set of documentation is available, 250 MB or so later, I have it.

Finally, I have access to the Man pages at the bottom of XCode's Help menu. I don't type "man" into a terminal: it is all there in the XCode documentation package.

2. Spotlight

The next place I go is Spotlight. I have all of the developer material indexed so spotlight will locate example code, saved web pages, and all kinds of other documents on my hard drive.

3. Cocoadev

Then I go to the web. Cocoadev is a WikiWikiWeb site containing a huge amount of user-contributed advice, code, explanations, links, and other material. It is easy to search, and you can contribute your own comments.

4. Cocoabuilder

Cocoabuilder is an archive of all of the postings to the Apple XCode, Cocoa, and Macosxdev mailing lists. There is a lot of Apple input on there. You can't post here. To post questions, sign up for the appropriate mailing lists at http://lists.apple.com/.

5. Borkware Quickies

Borkware and its associated Quickies page is a great place to find some of more useful and less documented ways of doing things. It's the creation of Mark Dalrymple, author of several Unix and Mac programming books and teacher at the Big Nerd Ranch.

6. Google

Finally, I Google what I am looking for. That will catch all kinds of things, including hits on the core foundation code, and open source efforts to duplicate parts of the Mac OS.

Tags: Cocoa, Resources, Xcode, Documentation