Xcode Docs Navigator

[The following is basically a transcription of a series of tweets.]

I have my wishes and druthers regarding the Xcode docs, but the Navigator pane in the docs window is pretty nice. Sometimes I want to learn the lay of the land of an unfamiliar framework. The docs Navigator is organized well for that use case.

Screen Shot 2018 07 26 at 1 47 40 PM

I like this list of Sequence and Collection protocols. For me it helps to have things like this summarized in one place. When I dive into a new project with an existing code base, I sometimes make a similar list by hand — for example, an outline of a particular class hierarchy.

Sequence and Collection Protocols

I like that there are "First Steps" sections for many of the frameworks. It's good to present them in this structured, discoverable way. They remind me of the old "concepts manuals" in NeXTSTEP.

Core Location First Steps

UIKit First Steps

One suggestion for improvement: IMO it would help to add an "Xcode" tab here:

Xcode Docs Navigator Tabs

The stuff that's in Help > Xcode Help > Show topics could be moved there. It would be more discoverable, it would provide a unified UI for all of Xcode's documentation, and we'd be able to open help topics in new tabs.

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