Thanks for writing this up.
I just want to browse through all the questions that are in my area of
skill, but so far have no answers.. So in the past I'd have drilled
through to something like "Developer / Objective-C" - now there seems
to be no structure at all. No way to just browse around.
Right. These discoverability issues are well known to the DevForums maintainers. Pending a fix, there are two workarounds you can apply:
The DevForums FAQ has a link to the list of tags.
If you’re interested in a specific tag, you can enter [TagName] into the search box to go to the tag page. This is a page of all the threads with that tag, sorted with the most recent first. For example, [Foundation] will take you to the Foundation tag page.
You can also get to this page by clicking on a tag where it’s displayed at the top of the thread.
Personally I deal with this by bookmarking the tag pages for the tags I care about.
There's so much whitespace! My mouse-miles are through the roof, there
doesn't seem to be good use of screen real estate.
You should definitely file a
bug about that. While the DevForums maintainers have likely heard it before, it doesn’t hurt to have them hear it again (-:
Please post your bug number, just for the record.
You can't reply to a reply. Again this looses structure and makes
following a thread really tricky.
I’m in two minds about this. I found the hierarchical presentation used by the old DevForums to be painful as well. For example, you couldn’t always find the newest post by scrolling to the end of the thread.
I deal with the new system by clearly quoting the text I’m responding to. One nice thing about the new forums is that the editor supports quoting without any shenanigans.
When I have a question I'll most likley post one thats been asked
before because I don't know what tags the first person will have used.
Right, but that’s true for any help forum. I generally recommend that you do a search before posting.
I’ve found search on the new forums to be
much better than search on the old ones, albeit with fewer features. What features are available are covered in the
DevForums FAQ.
Speaking of search features, this is an area where the DevForums maintainers are well aware of the current limitations.
Finally, keep in mind that DevForums is publicly readable, so it’s indexed by all the common search engines. If you can’t find something with the DevForums search, you can use a site-specific search on your favourite search engine.
I can't easily see all my own questions, to see if I have any replies.
To do this:
Click your avatar in the top right.
In the resulting popup, click anywhere in the top cell that’s outside of the Edit Profile link.
And yeah, I agree that this is quite non-obvious. We have a bug tracking that (r. 66042728).
I can't easily see what questions I have contributed to.
You can't subscribe to a topic, or even a question, and get
notifcations or emails when someone resonds.
These are both real limitations that the DevForums maintainers are well aware of.
In the meantime, I use a couple of techniques for handling this:
I always archive a copy of my own posts outside of DevForums, so I can easily find them again (EagleFiler ftw!).
If there’s a thread I’m interested in and that isn’t in a tag area that I poll, I save a bookmark to that thread.
Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@apple.com"
