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Apple Launches Reference Library
andy55 writes "If you thought Apple's online dev resources were already the best out there, they just got better. Apple has announced the launch of their new ADC Reference Library. Named features are: powerful search options, added navigation, 'Getting Started; docs on key technologies, and a more consistent organization. Impressively, the first search I ran in their search engine on a painful Mach-O dev issue I've been fighting for the last week turned up the key obscure tech info I needed!"
Meanwhile, skrysakj writes "Apple has launched a new Reference Library. I always thought their help/references for Developers was spotty (either non-existent or dead on) so this should be a welcome change."
However, in reference to the "spotty references" on developing... there's plenty of reference material for those who look... nice heavy folder full of documentation in the developer tools installation.
Even though I have no prior reason for distrusting Apple, I get the feeling that eventually this information will be accessible to developers paying a premium rather than those of us who signed up for the free account.
/Developer/Documentation that comes with OSX? 6 years ago I used to sit and while away the hours reading man pages and HOWTOs in Linux, and since I bought a PowerBook I find I'm doing the same kind of thing with their docs which I have locally installed. The ADC (that's Apple Developer Connection, not the monitor connector ;) looks awesome, but a local, offline copy would be even better.
Anyone know if the ADC is going to replace the current
I guess I could always buy a printer...
The newly release Reference Library is very well organized and makes finding things much easier. Good job, Apple! It's been a long time coming!
There's still a problem, though. Much of the "state of the art" documentation is actually happening on the Mac OS X and Cocoa mailing lists. It's good to have reference materials, but if you're looking for information on the latest & greatest addition to the OS, go search the archives.
You'll find that you can get answers directly from the developers before the reference materials are formalized and made public. As an example, in the months following last year's WWDC, there was a ton of information on the lists about the new Cocoa Bindings. As a developer who wants to stay on the leading edge of Mac OS X product development, this is invaluable.
Also, the guy that is running the mailing list archive, is looking for donations. If you are a developer who uses these archives, PLEASE DONATE.
-ch
Too bad :P I like cmd.exe and use it every day. Some features it has that give it some respectability:
- Redirection operators < > |
- Logical operators && ||
- Macros somewhat similar to bash's. Try doskey macro_name=command_line
- Ability to redirect stderr to stdout Try 2>1 or 1<&2
- User-defined file descriptors (or in Windows-speak, handles). >&3 >&4 and so on up to 9
- improved looping. for
/l %a in (start,step,end) do for_body for iterative loops.
- better text file parsing. Try for
/f. You can read in a text file, break it up into tokens and pass the tokens to a command. You can also do that with command output or strings.
- Tab completion
/dev/null workalike. Redirect to NUL instead.
- directory stacks. pushd and popd
- Ability to read in input and store it into a variable. set
/p variable=promptString
- Advanced arithmetic. set
/a can do modulus, bitshifts, bit flipping, compound assignment, xor, bitwise or, bitwise and
- improved decision selection. if string operator string body The operator can be equ for equal, gtr for greater than, and so on.
- grep replacement, findstr. Has the ability to use regular expressions.
Anyway, cmd.exe is not as crippled as command.com. It is much more capable and useful. It can even somewhat hold its own against Unix shells.