This is not a rant. I well appreciate the problem of maintaining documentation for a product that changes so rapidly.
But, having said that, I sure miss the old manual that had a detailed index and was in some sort of user predictable order.
With age, I forget what I once knew (or have not needed since the switch from Real Basic). But when I have to look through the four ‘presentation style’ books with no index to find something simple (how to edit the Program Icon!) using only the pdf’s Find function, I long for the old style.
I do have all the old books and they are a great help where things have not changed since Real Basic. But they are increasingly less useful. I subscribe to Xdev as well, but this does not serve the day to day purpose.
Bewildered as I sometimes feel, I wonder how new users, e.g from Visual Basic, get the answers that they need. In the VB6 days, when pressed, all you had to do was Google or query one of the many sites. Looking in a book was a last resort. Remember Balena’s wonderful tome?
I am old, and my methods may be too. I accept that. I am not going anywhere.
But I wonder if XoJo could be making things just a BIT TOO DIFFICULT to attract the new users that we all need to keep the product viable and growing.
There’s this lovely search tool called Google.
If you add the word Xojo to your search, you can very quickly find your result.
Let’s try it: http://google.com/search?q=change+app+icon+Xojo
The first result happens to be a topic on this forum.
https://forum.xojo.com/1597-adding-an-app-icon/0
Much easier than a book and an index if you ask me.
Your mention only of "four ‘presentation style’ books " makes me wonder if you are aware of the online documentation known as the “Language Reference”. When I need help with a Xojo construct (quite often) I pull up the LR right from the IDE toolbar and enter my search term. I find it quite thorough and handy. YMMV.
This is false for Xojo 2015r1 (and some previous versions).
Quite often the Language Reference is of no help, because sometimes the needed info i missing, but googling this forum (I don’t mean using the forum search) gives me the answer after browsing through a bunch of messages (time consuming) to get me pointed in the right direction. Sometimes the LR is plain wrong too.
If there was a better reference available to buy, I would buy it (book, file, whatever).
Re Index, in the pdf I see in 2015r1 a table of contents, but no index . Am I missing something?
Michael,
no index found at the end of the pdf Book #1: Fundamental, nor in the online version.
Sometimes a seach is easy in the PDF and sometines not: I get one of them this week when I only recalled NS. It happens that I was not searching the correct thing. I was happy to found the place where I made the mistake and was able to copy / paste the correct word and found what I was seeking.
Life is not always easy.
There was a discussion on Xojo Books recently, which can be viewed here