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From: tenny@ootool.dec.com (Dave Tenny)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: IB documentation GONE?
Message-ID: <1991Mar9.185839.27800@engage.enet.dec.com>
Date: 9 Mar 91 18:52:08 GMT
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Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
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In article <1991Mar9.092447.28614@agate.berkeley.edu>, izumi@fugitive.berkeley.edu (Izumi Ohzawa) writes...
>In article <SIMMONS.91Mar8220144@rigel.neep.wisc.edu> 
>  simmons@rigel.neep.wisc.edu (Kim Simmons) writes:
>>.... but there is no Interface Builder documentation at
>>all with the 2.0 Extended release! This makes IB useless to me.
> 
>What?  That's right. There's no IB docs even on 2.0 Extended.
>That's strange, there was 
>/NextLibrary/Documentation/NextDev/DevTools/02_InterfaceBuilder/*
>on 2.0beta (Fuchsia), and it's only 1.7MB.
>Why did they remove THE most critical doc for programming on NeXT?
> 
>The NeXT on-line documentation is not easy to follow, esp. because
>File Viewer and Browsers alphabetize files.
>Hopefully, printed 2.0 docs are better organized.
I once posted a message which said "the docs are perfectly
adequate".  Unfortunately, I was wrong.  The docs *were*
perfectly adequate in 1.0, but in 2.0 all of the useful
"concepts" manuals are missing.  Anybody who wants
to program the next (probably nearly everyone that owns
one right now), really needs the concepts documentation
to understand how to use IB, Objc, and Appkit.

This is unfortunate.  I at least have the recourse of
referring to the 1.0 docs, though they're out of date
for all the good things NeXT did for 2.0.

I asked someone at NeXT about this, and she told me
that it wasn't the intention of NeXT to remove this
useful information from the docset, and that they were
working on new, improved concepts manuals.  (If I understood
her correctly, the conversation took place awhile ago).

Frankly, I don't really understand what NeXT has in mind
for documentation.  But the tutorials, concepts manuals, and
anything else relevant to making use of NeXTStep and Mach
internals should be placed back online. 

I'd like to suggest that we all "urge" NeXT to do this
ASAP.  If I were a new NeXT user with only 2.0 documentation
available, I'd be very angry and confused about programming
my machine.  And we don't all have the time and money to spend
going to NeXT Developer's School at $995 a pop.

If NeXT 2.1 will fix this, great, but let's make those
docs available ASAP.

Also, new users, please don't send mail asking for
the 1.0 docs.  It's copyrighted material of NeXT, and
I imagine anything they're willing to distribute to the
net alread resides in the ftp archives.

Dave