Wouldn't you know, I was wondering about documentation in Xcode 8, and indeed it has fundamentally changed. The DevPubs team has hugely reduced the size of the docs and apparently integrated them with Xcode so that there is no longer a need for a separate download step.

Full, unified offline SDK documentation in Xcode 8? You're welcome!

— Dave Addey (@daveaddey) June 13, 2016

@benpickering *Nearly* one-tenth the size. *Nearly*.

— Dave Addey (@daveaddey) June 13, 2016

(Kudos also to @_jackhl, @swingler, and @mattpat, plus the lovely folks in Developer Publications, for those unified offline docs.)

— Dave Addey (@daveaddey) June 13, 2016

Running the Xcode 8 beta, I find I'm able to browse the docs with WiFi turned off. I know I'm looking at the Sierra docs, because NSGridView is there. Furthermore, docsets are no longer listed in the Downloads pane of the prefs panel. It's like magic — kudos to the DevPubs team!

I'm guessing this news about the docs was announced during the Platform State of the Union. I missed that session when it was live-streamed, so I'll have to watch it later. I'll see if it confirms my understanding, and I'll think about implications for AppKiDo.

The Developer Tools people at Apple have a lot of momentum lately. I can't remember when it felt so much like they were working hard to connect with us, to show that they hear us (the culture around Swift seems incredibly positive), to create cool tools, and to take away pain points.

I wonder if squashing the documentation size was important not only for Xcode but for the Swift Playgrounds iPad app and/or future possibilities for using iPads for development.