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Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!ndcheg!ndmath!milo
From: milo@ndmath.UUCP (Greg Corson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer,comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: APDA on a disk
Message-ID: <1387@ndmath.UUCP>
Date: 22 May 89 17:28:51 GMT
Organization: Math. Dept., Univ. of Notre Dame
Lines: 45

After taking some time to look through the developer helper CD, I have
only a few comments.

1. It needs a better index!  Possiblly a keyword searchable Hypercard stack
   or somthing similar.   Perhaps something like "find-file" but with a    
   pre-generated index so it wouldn't have to search the whole CD.

2. There should be a little more info on the items themselves...just a 
   comment in the GET INFO box would be nice.

3. Many items did not include any real documentation...this makes them almost
   worthless.  For example, RAMdump and ReAnimator had NO documentation at
   all, even to tell you what they were for.  There was also no doc for 
   ADSP (Apple data stream protocol)...it would be nice to at least have a 
   quicky installation doc or better-yet a how-to-use document along the
   lines of the sound manager chapter found elsewhere on the disk.
   The HyperAppleTalk stuff had documentation...but a lot of the rest of
   the stuff did not even have an installation documents.

Overall, the CD is a great idea, but it needs better indexing and needs to
include more documents.

Has anyone at Apple considered supporting the CDA (compound document
archetecture) format for text/graphics files?  This is the format supported
by DEC and other manufacturers.

As far as documentation on a disk...a documentation browser like DEC's
"bookreader" would be a good way to set it up.  It gives you a chapter
based index, click on a chapter to get the text.  There are also hypertext
links to pictures and other sections of the documentation.  ie: click
"see figure one" in the text and you get a window with figure 1.  If it
says See section 3.21  you click on that text and section 3.21 appears.

I'm sure you could do this with hypercard...but it might be difficult to
preserve all the fonts, pictures and styles.  I know the hypercard version
of technotes is all plain text.  The "bookreader" approach leaves in ALL
the original features of the document, typestyles, bold-lightface, 
lines, tables, drawings...etc.  If you are going to put Inside Macintosh on
a CD, it would be a lot more useful if all that information were preserved.

Greg Corson
19141 Summers Drive
South Bend, IN 46637
(219) 277-5306 
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