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DevDocs

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288 pointsAnzhelika76 comments

If you're on a mac you might want to check out Dash http://kapeli.com/dash

Very simliar goal, but offline and instant. After using it for a while it's hard to imagine going back to reading documentation in a web-browser.

Not to mention you can import and make your own DocSets, can integrate it with Xcode and much more. If you're developing anything on a Mac, you should probably have this installed (and pay to support it of course).

It's also a snippet manager, though I don't think many people use it for that purpose.

Dash has great support for CocoaDocs too so you can import open source libraries' DocSets. ( disclaimer: I made CocoaDocs. ) for example: http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/AFNetworking/1.3.1/

I concur, Dash is ace and a godsend when coding far away from Internet access.

FYI, Apparently there is a clone for Linux called ZealDocs (http://zealdocs.org/).

But only with fraction of content...

It seems to be compatible with Dash's DocSets, so you could use those on it.

This capability is what took me from trying the Dash demo to paying for the app.

Once the content became something I could use on all my computers and not just the Macs, it became worth the money.

Being cool and cooperative with Zeal earned the Dash developer at least one sale.

I built http://doks.io

Which supports all the documentation Dash does. (The web UI is pretty simple, it was built in an evening).

But both the server side and the web UI are open source.

If you like Dash, you might like Doks

This seems nice. I wonder if this could be made into a ST2/3 client :)

I can't type quickly in the search field. Kind of a bid deal.

Love Dash (and own a license), but there was sadly some controversy regarding their new icon and "inspiration" recently. Will try and find a link...

Edit: so the old Dash icon was a free icon from http://www.yootheme.com/icons/freebies (the cat one). Recently this icon was replaced with a custom one, which makes sense, except the new Dash icon seems to be heavily "inspired" by somebody else's work -- http://dribbble.com/shots/913643-Chrome-replacement-icon

See the comparison here: http://twitpic.com/ciu8a7

Relevant tweets:

[Dash dev]

https://twitter.com/kapeli/status/328037766166368256

https://twitter.com/kapeli/status/328112260805451779

[Icon designer]

https://twitter.com/wakaba_en/status/328075341618892800

Seems like the Dash dev disagrees with the icon author on where the line between "inspiration" and "plagiarism" lies. It doesn't help that there's a language barrier between the icon author and Dash developer.

Icon designer even proposed an alternative icon:

http://dribbble.com/shots/1046492-Dash-app-replacement-icon

But sadly it seems like this issue hasn't been rectified, but has just been forgotten about. I only found out about this after I'd bought a license; I'm posting this here in case someone else finds it relevant to their purchasing decisions.

I'm not familiar with the controversy besides what you posted, but my take away is that icon dev has some talent. The bookcase D is clever and well done, at least at that size.

In the link for the alternative icon, the icon designer has declined to enter any new discussions, as he felt "insulted" with the Dash developer's reactions on Twitter. He feels any more discussion is "a waste of time."

At any rate, I wish we non-Mac users had something like Dash.

In the interests of quoting the full context rather than just a few words, here's what he said in full:

"Dear The Great Developer of "Dash.app".

I do not ask you anymore. I do not say anything about your icon. It's a waste of time. But I am vindictive. Conversely, I inspired from your icon. This is the way of my protest. This time, you do not plagiarize this my icon, please.

Sayonara さよなら."

It seems the designer is Japanese, so there might be a language/cultural barrier too, but for what it's worth I think I would feel insulted by the Dash developer's reactions too!

Wow. That does seem like a rather blatant ripoff of the icon design.

Wow. I hadn't heard of this; looks amazing. Thanks for the heads up!

I love Dash, it's saved my butt when I've had spotty or zero Internet access. However, I've found that on my laptop it is far faster to do a web search for documentation than it is for Dash to do the search locally.

Hey look, it's another submission where the title conveys the exact same amount of information as the URL.

Which is a shame, because it's actually a pretty neat-looking HTML5/css/jquery reference.

I think it's fairly self explanatory, but the about page would have been a better submission:

http://devdocs.io/about

I’m not sure. I’d say allowing some editorialization in the title would have made a better submission.

Say, title: "DevDocs: An organized, and consistent interface to Web Documentation", with the same URL.

You're right, I misunderstood the complaint.

No, a better submission would have been a title that says what it is.

The idea that I have to click to find out is nonsense. It's link-bait.

I would have never clicked if I knew it was docs for HTML/CSS/JQuery, no matter how slick.

I thought it was something more exciting, like a service where developers can submit their own docs and it's a central repository of sorts. Now that would have been interesting.

Hey look, it's another top-rated comment that adds precisely zero to the actual discussion at hand.

This is awesome and I'm going to start using it today.

Suggestions: Look at what AaronO built and use it to add other sources.

Keep the current interface free, but let me pay some amount of money per year (or month?) to create an account and configure what sources it looks through. I'd like to have it search through django, python, git, and bootstrap docs as well.

Another option is to make offline support a paid feature.

I was thinking the same. We'll see.

Thanks for the idea.

I built a flexible scraper for downloading and filtering the docs so you can except more sources to be added soon.

Toggling docs on and off is also on my todo list.

Please add plain DOM documentation. I use jQuery, but I also use other libs or none at all, and having access to the DOM API would be wonderful.

I built something similar a few weeks ago: http://doks.io

(It supports all major languages and frameworks) (And it's open source !)

That is astonishing number of sources. But it is quite confusing when each source opens in different windows with different styling.

I wish there was some universal documentation format that could be shared among all software.

I think Sphinx (http://sphinx-doc.org/ ) is slowly becoming that.

Is there a place to suggest additional sources? Its quite the list, but there are a few more that I would use if you provided them.

I would love an interface like this for MDN's JS documentation.

http://dochub.io/

+1 (Or if I could get MDN's JS docs offline and in-browser (not Dash)).

Or Boost, maybe.

And if you are using Alfred (Mac) you could use http://wemakeawesomesh.it/alfred-dev-doctor/

I agree, dev doctor is awesome! It integrates everything on devdocs and more (caniuse, MDN for instance). Works seemlessly with alfred, making doc lookups super quick.

Full disclosure: friends with author of dev doctor

Is this something that I can host locally, using my own documents, like on an internal network?

Doesn't look like it. See the about page, I think that's a pretty good indicator he intends to host it (although might be open to selling a license).

Why isn't this project open-source?

Ultimately I'd like DevDocs to provide me with some income so I can keep improving it over the long-term. Until I figure out how to do that I've decided to keep the project closed-source. If you have comments or ideas about this I'd love to hear them.

Found a big bug: use up/down arrow keys to select an item on the left, then hit right and left keys to open and close the sub-lists. But, if you hit right twice or more it will append the sub list continuously below.

Indeed. Thanks for the report! I'll fix it soon.

Edit: fixed

Although you have browser support covered on a doc-by-doc basis, I would find it useful to have a rollup page by browser of gotchas. e.g. all the common JS gotchas for IE8 (e.g. no go on client.innerWidth), IE9 not supported opacity, etc.

Here's a ghetto example of a reference file I started after recent project that drove me nuts which would give you the sense of what I mean: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApBq5nqLSn9MdER...

Just a feed back: For me, I click on HTML(1) in the menu on the left, and it expands below the page. There seems to be a thin scroll bar to the right to scroll down, but I cant grab it to scroll down. Only arrow keys and mouse wheel work. IMHO, scroll bar needs some work.

Edit: (1)Correction I click on HTML, then HTML5. Then the list goes below the bottom of the browser, then I cant grab the scroll bar.

Sorry for any confusion.

Thanks for the bug report. I'll fix it soon :)

DocHub already exists that does the same thing but with more docs.

http://dochub.io/

For me, DevDocs is nicer at the moment:

- It's faster

- I don't have to select a programming language before I can start searching

- It handles keyboard input a lot better. As soon as the page loads, I can start typing, move down with the arrow keys and activate a selection with the enter key.

Sure but it seems far less content. Maybe speed will suffer as content increases. Sites like this, IMHO, are about content, not speed.

Never underestimate the importance of responsiveness in user interfaces, especially when those interfaces are used look something up.

Very cool - but when I'm on an iPad you keep bring up the keypad because you focus on search. Can you fix that?

It seems odd that something that's just fetching and displaying snippets of HTML doesn't have a non-js fallback. But from the About it looks like this is a personal project made public in case anyone else finds it useful.

There has been a nice predecessor since 2006: http://www.gotapi.com and http://start.gotapi.com

Really nice! It would be usable if it was free software so I could add docs for the different libs&langs I'm using. When it's closed, it's sadly not usable (although a very nice show).

Your browser version checker thing is wrong.

I am using WebKit nightly (which should be categorized under "Safari 5.1+"), and it gave me a warning that said my browser was unsupported. As a user of a potentially unstable browser, I don't mind when sites freak out because it's usually something I can report back to the WebKit team. So I'd really like to see if my bleeding-edge Safari (I guess this would be 6 technically?) can run DevDocs… :)

Yes, sorry. I deployed a bug that blocked all browsers for a couple of minutes. It's fixed.

Any chance of releasing the theme within a styling framework like Bootstrap? This would be amazing for some of our internal tools and documentation.

Edit: I see the author responded to "Why isn't this open-source?" on the About page, http://devdocs.io/about

This looks very promising!

Here's a suggestion. My favourite source for Rails docs is apidock.com because it allows people to comment and supply examples. It would be really nice if devdocs could incorporate something like that or perhaps even a wikipedia-like way to update the docs.

In Chrome if I right click in the search box and add it as a search engine it doesn't work :(

As a long time technical writer, allow me to convey my sheer joy at how awesome this is. Issues with the submission and its descriptiveness in terms of HN standards aside, this is super wicked awesome and makes me warm and fuzzy inside.

Thanks! :)

Looks awesome. Very useful.

How is this site made? It looks like changing pages are ajax transitions but the url is changing at the top? Could someone point me in the direction of how this is made please. Would be really interested.

HTML5 history.pushState

It's the HTML5 History API.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/DOM/Manip...

Thanks a lot. I have a seen a few sites like this and have been wondering. Sites using this feel like they load so much faster and more fluidly.

Without looking at the source, I would say it is using the History API introduced in HTML5.

Here is a nice article describing it: http://diveintohtml5.info/history.html

A simple example with source can be found here: http://html5demos.com/history

I'm not sure that it's the only reason why IE isn't supported, but currently no version of IE supports the history api, which is a bit of an annoyance if you aren't developing a site that you can block certain browsers from using.

The nav tree doesn't seem to remember which items I had expanded if I collapse the parent and then open it back up. Is this intentional?

Very cool resource, though. Thanks!

Thanks! It's intentional because I haven't had the time to implement it yet. ;)

Reminds me of: http://ruby-docs.com/

Oh this is so much nicer to read through than other sites.

Favorited!

TIL that sup is obsolete HTML, while sub is not.

Added to my todo list. Thanks!

Sweet. Can you please add javascript reference?

Thanks. I built a very flexible scraper underneath. JS/DOM docs are coming soon.

This is really great! I will probably use this.

Thanks

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