Open Radar

 
Xcode should provide an easy-to-use way to get notes for user-defined methods (and other identifiers) in Quick Help. Currently, option-clicking a method name shows a panel with the selector and defining file… and that's it. (Option-clicking a class seems to show the Quick Help for the closest framework class, often NSObject. Seems wrong?)

The Quick Help panes would be infinitely more useful if they could show custom information. The most obvious approach to this is using a special comment format (see Doxygen, HeaderDoc, et al.) to provide a small blurb for custom methods, classes, etc. Even if it starts out just limited to methods, it would be actually useful.



Right now, the Quick Help panes seem to show exactly what I already know and hide exactly what I WANT to know. For example, the quick help for -appendString: shows:

Name: appendString:
Declaration: - (void)appendString:(NSString *)aString
Availability: iOS (2.0 and later)
Abstract: Adds to the end of the receiver the characters of a given string.
Parameters:
aString: The string to append to the receiver.

Declared In: NSString.h
Reference: NSMutableString Class Reference
Related Documents: String Programming Guide


Yes, that's evident by the name of the method. Cocoa uses long names as they make the above self-explanatory. I must open the full documentation browser to get the five words that are actually interesting:

"aString must not be nil"

If the logic used to generate Quick Help blurbs was COMPLETELY INVERTED, it would be far better.