Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Using the Apple developer discussion boards
The Apple Developer boards are perhaps the least useful developer resource. Alternative developer boards such
as stackoverflow (
www.stackoverlow.com
) have built up a larger collection of questions and answers, discussed
in more depth. They're also indexed by Google, which simplifies topic and keyword searches.
The chief advantage of the official developer boards is that Apple employees sometimes read and comment.
Otherwise, you can typically get more detailed and more helpful comments from elsewhere, from developers
who may have worked through a problem and posted the code for a full solution.
Asking for technical support
Both the iOS and OS X Developer Programs offer developers up to two code-level support incidents per year.
You can use these to discuss your code with an Apple technical support engineer. The engineers won't be able
to understand a huge project instantly, so technical support incidents are best used for mysterious but localized
issues that resist conventional debugging and are beyond the insight of other developers.
Many of the internal features of iOS and OS X are undocumented, and code doesn't always work as you expect
it to. For example, UI code may create extra ancillary views while managing transitions, or UI objects may have
complex features that can't be accessed externally. Apple engineers are more likely to be aware of these quirks
than external developers. But Apple doesn't guarantee that engineers will solve a problem, only that they will
look at it. Developers who find the service useful can buy two extra incidents for $99 or five for $249.
CAUTION
