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Comment by Mindwipe | Hacker News Reader

If Apple spent more than $11 dollars on documentation they also might not be in the situation they're currently in.

So much of what happened in Catalina is just flat out not written down in the Developer Documentation. Apple's documentation has been waning for a while, but it's fallen off a cliff in the last eighteen months.

It's impossible to believe that's not having an impact on external software quality, and it's difficult to believe it isn't having an impact on Apple's own applications too.

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I remember doing my first hackintosh, due to an attempt at a startup where we wanted to have a iOS and OSX client.

The documentation blew me away, nicely packaged with XCode, and made it really look like a platform that would care about developers, especially given how niche it was.

That was 10.6 time.

Currently, I have a Mac forced on me by company. I look at docs... and they are the same docs I remember, with bits missing, a "deprecated banner" from 5 years ago. Deprecation notices give no information what APIs one should use in place, or where new documentation is.

This boggles my mind. My flabber is ghasted.

Documentation is of paramount importance! How else will people build an ecosystem around your software if they can't figure out how to use it in a variety of ways?

I really hope this isn't some trend of just abandoning the commons, taking without adding back in.

I think the point is to get the average beginner dev frustrated and not make macos apps. They've been pruning the platform slowly but surely for quite some time now

ipad seems to be their focus for "pro" stuff now. Now that iPad apps can run on macos i think that's a clear sign that if you want to make a macos app - don't bother, make an ipad app

The Catalyst documentation for running iPadOS apps on a Mac is actually the worst offender. It's garbage, and unusable. Anyone who has built a Catalyst app has effectively had to reverse engineer significant parts of the APIs. God only knows if some of them are supposed to be private, and if Apple will suddenly decide they are and reject apps from the store for it.

I don't think there's a deliberate conspiracy here. All this stuff is launching two years before it's ready, and subject to a huge internal war at Apple - it's fairly clear a chunk of the MacOS team doesn't want to do Catalyst fearing it's the death of the Mac, even if the management do.

I had the same experience trying to write a plugin for Logic Pro early this year. None of the old documentation or examples were relevant, and I never did find anything from Apple that did work. I finally used someone else's framework as a starting point.

There are a surprising amount of Catalyst API documents that literally just have the function name and no description of what it does and an empty page.

That sounds an awful lot like a typical project that starts out on the right foot, everyone has a procedure they follow but crunch time approaches and they start to cut corners just to get things done. Documentation and testing are the first I’ve seen to go.

The quality of the original "Inside Macintosh" books was the main reason I started programming on the Mac back in the day, and lost interest in the Amiga.

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