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Subject:RE: What to call a guide accompanying an SDK? From:"Murrell, Thomas" <TMurrell -at- alldata -dot- net> To:TECHWR-L <TECHWR-L -at- LISTS -dot- RAYCOMM -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 30 Nov 1999 07:41:22 -0500
Peter Kelly asks a lot of questions.
> What would you call a guide or manual accompanying a software
> developer's kit? Can you have a guide to a kit? Does that not seem
> strange?
>
I would call it a guide. Yes, I think you can have a guide with a kit. No,
It doesn't seem strange to me, but then I seem strange to some. <g>
> The kit is a bunch of software components intended for developers so that
> they can whip out applications fast. I thought that the guide was the
> "kit"
> itself, since the components to be distributed in the SDK do not have any
> sort of documentation or user interface and the only indication one could
> get on how to use the "kit" was from the documentation--so why not call it
> the "SDK".
>
The above is a little confusing. Either you do have documentation, even if
it's built into the application, or you do not. And are you arguing that
you don't need documentation? If so, I will assume you have tested this
assumption on a user audience to see how they did without documentation.
Some people believe that if you truly design an intuitive application it
would need no documentation. I reserve judgment until someone brings me
such an application to test. I'd be happy to do so.
