Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote on 6/10/19 9:57 AM:
Regards "the fucking manuals", Larry, since I was a tech support engineer, technology manager, and later a staff writer at Apple for years and years, I take personal offense when you say Apple decided not to provide manuals anymore. Apple produced terabytes worth of manuals over the years, and still does. In the olde days, they were beautiful hard and soft bound books, pamphlets, instruction manuals, etc. No one wanted them anymore about a decade and a half ago, they wanted online docs. So Apple moved all that data into web presented documents and online help. More people use them, but of course everyone like you complains about the lack of printed documentation ... that they never read anyway. They still don't read the online help and web documentation as much as they should, depending instead on half-baked hearsay and often scary "wisdom" provided by Google searches and slash-dot. Of course, the UNIX documentation suite is all there in a Terminal window, if you ever chose to look at it. So go RTFM yourself. *I* wrote, edited, and made sure to the greatest extent that I could that the fucking stuff was both there and well presented, at least within the context of my job which was development information about the Xcode IDE, compilers, linkers, various different development platform tools and frameworks, and some of the hardware that allows things like CarPlay to exist. The stress of that job over a half a decade's work very very nearly killed me, and I'm not fucking kidding when I said killed, and forced my early retirement in order to save my life.
Godfrey, being a few years your junior I do not have quite so many years reading and writing computer documentation as you do, but my experience is still measured in decades. I have no doubt that you wrote some very fine documentation, and I very likely never saw a line of it.
When I got my iMac, after a couple decades of using Linux (and other versions of Unix), MSDOS, TRSDOS, RSTS-11, CP/M, and too many other operating systems to remember, much less count, I found the much vaunted intuitive user interface to be opaque, and difficult to figure out. I tried using the supplied documentation to figure out how to do simple basic tasks, and shortly gave up and gave Mr. Pogue my money, because despite any bright spots I saw in Apple software, the documentation that I attempted to use was a terrible blot.
I still think that there are many fine aspects of Apple products but all too often their user manual make me miss the clarity of Linux documentation. And if you really want to hear what I sound like when I'm annoyed, ask me about Adobe's written documentation.
-- Larry Colen [email protected] http://red4est.com/lrc https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/collections/72157612824732477/ -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
