Isn’t anyone at Apple even mildly embarrassed about how poor the ADC search results are?
Like everyone other Mac developer (at least, those not using a seed… no comment otherwise), I’ve been bit by the Mac OS X 10.5.7 bug that causes Xcode to crash almost every time the documentation viewer is used.
Now I’m a reasonable guy. I get that a Mac OS X update has to be thoroughly tested. I wouldn’t want it otherwise. So let me get this off my chest right away: it isn’t the bug itself that bothers me.
Xcode 3.1.3 shipped after Mac OS X 10.5.7. So it should have been pretty easy to add code to Xcode see if the developer has executed a defaults write com.apple.xcode dontevershowthefuckingdocviewer 1 and then never show the documentation viewer, so I wouldn’t lose unsaved work every time I forgot and tried to open it. ((Maybe use a different identifier for it.))
And in the future, the documentation links should be handled via an URL type that can be handled by another application.
And, oh yeah:
Why is the documentation viewer embedded in the IDE?
Splitting the documentation viewer into a separate application would make a lot of sense. Browsers crash! If it wasn’t this, it would be something else that crashed the documentation viewer. This was predictable. This was, dare I say, expected.
But what really, really makes me angry is the developer site. The content is generally pretty good, but the search engine is horrible:
- Fix your summary so it’s actually useful.
Apple’s summary:
Google’s summary:
There’s just no comparison. ((Google, you rock.)) - I don’t need to see every single empty redirect. Showing the same effective document multiple times is just random clutter.
- There are better ways to represent the format of documentation in search results than just including it in the URL.
- Add up those last two items, and you realize: I don’t need PDFs in the search results. PDF should just be linked to from the documentation itself.
I’ll update this when I have more points. The bile has receded enough for me to code again.