The Incredible Shrinking Docs

Wouldn't you know, I was wondering about documentation in Xcode 8, and indeed it has fundamentally changed. The DevPubs team has hugely reduced the size of the docs and apparently integrated them with Xcode so that there is no longer a need for a separate download step.

Running the Xcode 8 beta, I find I'm able to browse the docs with WiFi turned off. I know I'm looking at the Sierra docs, because NSGridView is there. Furthermore, docsets are no longer listed in the Downloads pane of the prefs panel. It's like magic — kudos to the DevPubs team!

I'm guessing this news about the docs was announced during the Platform State of the Union. I missed that session when it was live-streamed, so I'll have to watch it later. I'll see if it confirms my understanding, and I'll think about implications for AppKiDo.

The Developer Tools people at Apple have a lot of momentum lately. I can't remember when it felt so much like they were working hard to connect with us, to show that they hear us (the culture around Swift seems incredibly positive), to create cool tools, and to take away pain points.

I wonder if squashing the documentation size was important not only for Xcode but for the Swift Playgrounds iPad app and/or future possibilities for using iPads for development.

2 thoughts on “The Incredible Shrinking Docs

  1. Pingback: Michael Tsai - Blog - WWDC 2016 Links

  2. A new docs are a complete disaster and developer killer. No more useful links at top of the page, no more all methods on one page to see all you need. You have to click back/fwd to see a few corresponding methods. Headache, nothing more… And documentation for Obj-C is more poor then Swift. It is a complete sabotage. Hate this "modern" and "optimized" docs… Wish you use it selves…

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