Gordon Meyer, one of the founders of the old-school cyberculture hax0r zine "Computer Underground Digest" is working for Apple these days, on the built-in help system. He's got a blog devoted to documentation and help systems — a great peek into the world of the context-sensitive.
A thread on the always-excellent TidBITS-Talk mailing list discusses a "report card" for Mac OS X. Editor Adam Engst gives the documentation a "C" grade, and in the process brings up an interesting point.
"I think I'd give Mac OS X a C for documentation and help. A D, in my mind, would imply it was actually wrong in a lot of cases, rather than just being overly simplified. Plus, I bump it up a bit because there is a lot of good information out there from third parties, if you can find it." [Full Message]
This never occurred to me before, but if we're objectively evaluating how well documented a product might be, should the universe of third-party documentation be excluded? From the customer's perspective, how much does it really matter if the bulk of the documentation is not "official?"
