WWDC23 - Developer Documentation
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Yes, visionOS is cool - but have you ever had effective developer documentation?
Holy crap, did we get it this year. Apple has been much maligned over the years regarding the documentation situation. For every new framework, there was a new entry (or two, or three, or…) at nooverviewavailable.com - which was a serious downer for those of us trying to simply understand what had changed, was removed or added.
Credit where credit is due - once the keynote wrapped and the docs dropped, I came to realize that this is, without question, the best state the documentation has been in for several for years.
Finally, finally!!!!, there is an entire section dedicated to the “big picture” stuff:
It’s setup just the way my mind works, too. For starters, there is the “Hey look! New stuff from dub dub!” links. If they stopped there? Cool - that would’ve been a massive improvement.
But thankfully, they didn’t.
There are links to:
- Whats’ New in Frameworks (even in UIKit!)
- SDK Release Notes
- Security Updates
…and more. I immediately bookmarked this, and it’s already become a frequent stop of mine. All of this, of course, wouldn’t really matter if the information found within them wasn’t top notch. But it is - look at UIKit:
This is exactly the stuff I want to know about. Plus, they’ve got dedicated pages to code samples from the past three W.W.D.C. conferences and they’ve got filtering for additions, removals and modifications. I do want to point out I’d love to be able to filter those things exclusively, but hopefully that’ll come later.
Even better - the HIG got in on the action, too. Continuing with last year, they’ve kept an up-to-date change log. This is, simply stated, huge for me. As someone who reads it top-to-bottom each year for obvious reasons, this saves me large swathes of time. And, it’s available in more languages, too!
Final Thoughts
This was a year where I looked back and said, “I feel like people who make apps in the App Store work at Apple now”, because it just feels like they’ve identified real pain points and have solved for them.
Hat tip to Cupertino & Friends™️ - excellent work this year, folks.
Until next time ✌️