Search for “threading” on ADC in the Cocoa area
Search for “threading” on MSDN

The first result on ADC refers to thread safety with QuickTime. The first result on MSDN refers to a thread synchronization class. Both are good topics but not general enough for us – that’s fine. Let’s try each topic and see how easy it is to get to general thread information.

The ADC doc, while being very QuickTime-specific, provides plenty of sample code, scenarios, links to off-site references and way down at the bottom there’s a link to a threading architectures ADC article. I say article because it reads like a magazine article, a third of which is dedicated to Mac OS 9. I don’t see methods, properties, samples or anything that’ll help get me started.

The MSDN doc, goes on about synchronization. Well, I’m not sure what that is or how it’s usefull (yet). But I see breadcrumbs pointing me back up the doc chain to a general System.Threading doc. I see its namespace, the libary that the threading API is in (in .NET, they’re assemblies), an object heiarchy and a “see also” that points to other MSDN docs that might be relavant.

I’m not anti-Apple. I think MacOS X is a superior operating system right now. But their developer documentation doesn’t give me the warm ‘n’ fuzzies like Microsoft’s does. Sadly, developer documentation isn’t a sexy topic. It won’t make the front page of Engadget or appear in TV commercials. But when you get down to it, an operating system requires great apps to make it successful. And to make great apps, developers need quality documentation.

Udo: FfmpegX looks really nice. If the customer had Mac hardware, that would probably be the route to choose. Unfortunately, he was running QuickTime Pro 7 on Windows XP, and that was his only option.

As for the movie conversions FfmpegX is great but I prefer the manual way of After Effects.

Do you have an ADC account? Have you ever been to WWDC? If not get one, vist it, respectively. And then post again.

And the saddest part? Very true…