Xojo recently launched the [BugBash2022] initiative and many people actively participate. That’s great.
What concerns me, as someone who is relatively new to Xojo, is the amount if missing, incomplete and factually erroneous information in the documentation.
I consider the documentation of a technical product being an integral part of the product (deliverable), because there is no sensible means of use without proper documentation.
Many bugs have been fixed swiftly, which is also great. From various discussions it transpired that the selected search engine ‘typesense’ is not suited to provide sensible result lists for the type of documentation at hand.
And I am getting the impression that errors get fixed with a sometimes too narrow focus. There is a risk that instead of fixing systemic issues, the documentation bug bashing devolves to a whack-a-mole game.
The documentation was transitioned from https://docs.xojo.com to the new site.
And during the transition some things seem to have been overlooked, forgotten, coalesced and generally made not as nice.
While the new site is “prettier” its functionally way worse IMHO
IMHO the wiki’s BIG advantage is that it does a full text search of the entire contents and presented a page of results
The new site search is way less helpful - unless you already know exactly what you’re looking for
1000% percent agree with this sentiment
Documentation is as much a part of the product as any code they write
But I dont see any evidence that Xojo feels the same and so documentation is always an afterthought, possibly out of date, or inaccurate (as you note)
I’ve been using the tool for over 20 years and I still open the documentation nearly every day. This is the, oh, 5th (??) iteration in my time and this is by far the worst. And don’t get me going on still working with API1 projects and finding information.
The new documentation search is abysmal at best. The content is less than there was before and lacking some crucial details on edge cases.
I look at the docs only to be sure of something while I open documentation all the time to search (and sometimes find) how to do that in API2.
I think this is the reason why I use Xojo 21r2.1 instead of the current version (I type the old api word and it gives me the API2 version).
But I use 2015r1.
In my car, nearly one hour ago, I determined the start of the decline (REALbasic/Real Studio) at the Carbon / Cocoa debacle transition. It tooks 1 year more than what was announced…
NB: I was happy with REALbasic 5.5.5… I already knew then that I will never earn money with it, but I was happy.
Back to the documentation:
how many question there was on “How do I connect to the SQLite data base” did we read on TOF ?
Did they change the SQLite documentation ?
No. (the Forum users are there to give the answers).
How many potential customer did they loose because of that ?
yes i know what you are saying, since i only recently move to 2022, the doc is different.
i use a lot the doc recentlyv so i got pissed off by the side bar.
the side bar is the problem
so i solved the problem with making xol instead of the navigation bar
you can try latest alpha r5, it’s fully functionnal, even has history.
you can choose if you open the doc in xol or your browser
