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Faster docs for iOS
19 points by nerdtastic5 on Nov 24, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments
A while back I got frustrated with slogging through the ultra slow Apple documentation pages. I kept asking "Why is it faster to lookup the UIView docs in Google than directly on developer.apple.com?" So one afternoon I cooked up this super-simple page to make it quicker to get to the docs:

  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1892875/ios/ios_search.html
Just start typing a class name in the box. It autocompletes for most class names, or you can hit "enter" and it will run a little Google search for you. Stackoverflow answers are thrown in just for grins.

As you can see, this little page is super primitive, but in fact I use it constantly when I'm programming on iOS, just to avoid that molasses-like Apple interface. If anyone feels like expanding on this script or building a better version - please have at it.



This is great! The Apple doc browsers are SO awful. I've filed a report with Apple about it. The problem seems to be that their search/index code always runs locally and is abysmally slow.

Can you auto-select the top result by default? It's a drag to press down-arrow to select the first result.


I actually find the built-in Xcode documentation (⌘⌥?) reasonably snappy (and I'm on a pretty slow Core i3 box whose only redeeming feature is 16GB of RAM).

I would definitely choose Google (or your app -- it's pretty slick) over the current documentation web site.


I really like the free OS X application Ingredients - http://fileability.net/ingredients/





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