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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I suspect Apple's culture of not really caring about backwards compatibility and otherwise technological churn is mostly responsible for this; e.g. if I wanted to write Windows GUI app that'll run on everything from Win95 to Win10 and probably for the forseeable future, I'd choose Win32 because it's stable and well-documented. On Linux, a combination of POSIX and Xlib would probably have similar stability. But I'm not sure what the equivalent would be for the Mac...

That said, I've noticed MS's documentation quality also take a nosedive in recent years, notably around the time it moved away from MSDN (and introduced a huge amount of formatting errors.) A lot of useful "KB" articles and downloads also mysteriously disappeared. Fortunately I still use "WIN32.HLP" which basically covers the core part of Win32.

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I love how they go to great lengths to describe and recommend that for Win8 and above you should use Pointer API instead of the "legacy" mouse and touch events, because it'll also handle Pen too. Yet when you actually go to click on WM_POINTER*, they are, just like Apple, in an archived section. Tapping on the "see latest doc" just takes you to the home screen. Yet, WM_LBUTTONDOWN takes you to the latest updated version. Talk about a confusing mess.

docs.microsoft.com PM here. Thanks for the feedback - I am routing this to the content team so that we can see what we can do to improve this situation.

This comment alone, and the lack of any comment by any Apple rep so far down the comments, makes me think that I did the right thing ditching macOS as my main web development workstation in favor of Windows.

What makes you think that you should expect that someone working at Apple, who can fix your issue, will materialize in the comment section of Hacker News and solve your problems (and then reply to you saying that they will do so)? It's nice when relevant people step in and help, but there's a proper channel for this feedback (even if you don't think it's going to be heard).

"Proper channel"... :)

That vastly more critical Facetime/facepalm issue certainly went straight to /dev/null , so ... thanks for the laugh, I guess.

This isn't a great answer, because there _is_ some literature to point to concerning how feedback (bugs and otherwise, regarding engineering) is handled at Apple: https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2019/03/the-sad-state-...

The game that Apple's dev evangelism needs to play is the same one that MSFT/Google/etc play. Apple gets a free pass because they've had a largely devoted (almost cult-ish) fanbase of software developers (of which I count myself). They're starting to piss them off, though, and that has cascading effects.

Lobbing things over the wall doesn't work anymore.

If you read the article (I'm generally aware of the issues mentioned, FWIW), there isn't really much it tells you to do other than file bugs.

I did read the article, considering I linked it in the first place. The snark isn't necessary.

The ending of that article is a very resigned "this is all you can do. This is why it's this way, though.". The article is absolutely a criticism of how the bug process works.

The entire point of all of this is that Apple needs to play the game better. You have a weird habit of popping up in every single thread to defend them, and I've noted your past associations with them in other threads, so I'll probably not bother responding to this further.

> I did read the article, considering I linked it in the first place. The snark isn't necessary.

I meant this more as "if you go back and read the article, looking for the part I mentioned, since you may have missed this", which I included because you said my answer wasn't really great "because of so and so" even though it basically just restated what I had said. I know about the problems you're mentioning are: you know how I would.

> The ending of that article is a very resigned "this is all you can do. This is why it's this way, though.". The article is absolutely a criticism of how the bug process works.

> The entire point of all of this is that Apple needs to play the game better. You have a weird habit of popping up in every single thread to defend them, and I've noted your past associations with them in other thread

Again, I'll freely admit I generally lean towards Apple because of the amount of time I've spent associated with the platform/tools/company, but I'm not disagreeing here: I'm with you 100%. As Corbin notes, however, filing bugs is more likely to get your issues noticed (and possibly responded to) than posting it four comments deep on a thread that admittedly has a higher-than-normal chance of getting clicked on by an Apple engineer. I guess if you know an engineer you might be able to see if they can institute change, but even then I'm not sure that would help much. Getting articles like these on the front page of Hacker News regularly might, though…

Yeah but this is hackernews, if there aren't apple devs looking at this thread(or someone forwarding this thread to an apple dev contact) it'd be somewhat amazing.

Making devs feel like they're being listened to is an important part of attracting devs nowadays, which ofcourse apple says they're above. Apple famously doesn't chase anyone after all(with predictable results).Instead apple evangelists like you have to take up the standard - which doesn't assure anyone.

There's almost certainly Apple engineers looking at this thread, but I'm not confident on their ability to change anything meaningful or talk about what the situation looks like internally.

At the very least they could mention that there is an internal process going on to improve docs. the fact that there haven't been any is an indication of a growing trend at apple going the same way as Samsung/Sony - "who cares about devs?"

Apple doesn't seem to encourage this kind of behavior :(

Don’t get too excited. Responding here is easy, doing something about it is much harder. MS has gone downhill since the 90s. The MSDN CDs used to be great but somehow they decided they should make things worse regularly. The current web site has terrible search, has lots of links broken and the content seems mainly auto generated. Not a very good experience if you need to find something.

Point taken - we always definitely have room to improve. There are two avenues you can submit feedback: https://aka.ms/sitefeedback, for anything that is related to site functionality, and the footer of each article, where we integrate GitHub feedback, where we enable GitHub issues.

If, for some reason, the article you are looking at has issues but no feedback affordance, use our site feedback channel or DM me on Twitter (@DennisCode) - would be happy to route the feedback and make sure we address it.

We triage those items fairly regularly.

Just wondering: How long have you been working at this and are you personally happy with the state of things? Do you even use the site? Vendors always ask for feedback but a) when you submit feedback, it usually disappears in a black hole b) if they actually used the stuff themselves they would already know about most problems.

I don't want to attack you personally but MS support always has been a black hole and when I look at the feedback forums there are always these generic messages ("We are sorry,. Pleas help us to understand") that either are written by robots or certainly feel like that. But nothing ever gets resolved, there never is a direct answer to clear problems.

Not to pick on you personally, but this habit of the new Microsoft irritates me to no end. Microsoft's response to everything is "give us feedback and we'll fix it"

Do people at Microsoft not use their own products, so they don't know something's broken unless a user reports it ?

Using users for QA has made Windows 10 the worst Windows I've ever used and it's something to see that same attitude permeate every Microsoft product.

There are AppKit devs who lurk here, but due to Apple's (somewhat written, somewhat unwritten) policies, you'll rarely if ever see them out themselves as such.

I remember I did a double take when I saw Corbin answering questions about NSTableView on StackOverflow, felt like hell had frozen over.

Well, since you are here... can we have something like the old MSDN CD CHM files and/or WIN32.HLP files (ie. a simple offline version of the documentation that includes everything)?

Almost every other mention of Win32 documentation here and on Reddit has someone mention that they use some archived version of WIN32.HLP (or less often, CHM) instead of the sites because it is simpler and faster. But this documentation only covers the circa late 90s APIs and doesn't have any newer stuff and to view .HLP files on Windows 10 requires some hacking around (honestly it is absurd to break the help for several thousands applications and make several ebooks unreadable, but i guess it isn't something you can do anything about even if you wanted).

Considering everything is static (and really, some of the documentation entries read the same as they do in WIN32.HLP from the mid-90s) it should be possible to make a CHM (or several of them) with the content available for download (but please not yet another custom help viewer, CHM is fine).

TBH i do not have many hopes for this (i think this is something people ask for more than a decade), but it costs nothing to ask, so there you go :-P

The latest you can download offline might be this:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2095...

(Best to get a copy while you still can...)

Thanks, i didn't knew about that :-).

I don't know what the current MS doc situation is, but years ago when I left Windows dev to move to iOS I really missed the MS docs. The big reason was that they had tons of examples. I used the XPath MS docs for many years because they had so many clear examples.

While you're here the rename of the URLs has caused me pain. For example (here on Task.Unwrap)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.threading...

The code sample has broken links, the correct pfxteam blog is: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/pfxteam/whats-new-in-beta-2-f...

It would be great if 404 page could show the posts for that day for the 4-Nov-2009 time period

I feel like maybe hyperlinks in developer docs were a bad idea.

Writing technical documentation as if it would be published in thousand page tomes (because it would also be published that way) may have encouraged better writing and organization.

> I suspect Apple's culture of not really caring about backwards compatibility

Not only that, but there's a famous article in Apple University about how no documentation is a good thing and a key part of Apple culture.

Can you share a copy or a citation? I wasn't able to find this.

That's kinda meta, honestly

This explains so very much - imagine trying to hack on something as big & as crufty as iTunes without guidance.

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