Brain Murmurs

Xcode has a very, very good set of searchable documentation that you can access from within Xcode by going to Help->Documentation. It comes with a set of bookmarks including:

• Interface Builder User Guide
• AppKit Reference
• Foundation Reference
• Web Kit Reference

For a long time I used the browser-based documentation located under on the hard drive under /Developer/Documentation. Unfortunately, it’s not the best reference for searching and, as far as I can tell, is mostly limited to general API documentation. As a consequence of this I spent a lot of time looking up minutia about NSTableView and it’s brethren on google instead.

I had seen the Documentation link before, but had assumed that it was going to be some lightweight fare about the basics of using the Xcode IDE, not a set of developer’s documentation spiritually equivalent to Safari Bookshelf.

I’ve known about what I’m about to say for awhile, but I’ve been so embarrassed that I missed it that I’ve really sat on this instead of mentioning it. Hopefully this will be useful to anyone else that didn’t know.

Follow up

Mike Lee of Delicious Monster pointed out that you can pull up said documentation at any time by pressing option, command, shift, and ? at the same time. Works well.

He also mentioned that you can look up specific terms in the documentation directly from your source code by holding down the option key and double clicking on the term of interest.

Thank you, Mike.

Filed under: Professional Services by Daniel