From a user's perspective it was great to use. From a programmer's perspective it was a bitch to program for.

Now fix your damn blog so it doesn't re-appear in NNW everytime some idiot posts a comment.

That's what the other feed is for silly :). Some people like knowing when people post comments.

I agree with Jon. I like know what peoples comments are and when they are posted.

What I would really like is some markup that tells NetNewsWire or XYZ RSS program that an RSS feed for the comments is located at a certain location. That way I can set in my news reader how to show comments.

What made it horrible to program for?

Jon: there is markup for that, in RSS 2.0. In Radio's news aggregator it shows up as a little pencil. I think NetNewsWire supports it too.

It was horrible to program for because you had to anticipate every eventuality, and program it very tediously. When it worked well, it was amazing. I think with the accessibility stuff in 10.2, it could be a lot easier to implement. The Quicken Guide was really cool, it even used speech to lead you through things.
But like GX, OpenDoc, AOCE, etc., Apple Guide was a symbol of an Apple that no longer exists. These days, it's all lower tech, less proprietary, for the most part.

Whoops, I missed the 'RSS feed for comments' thing. I think the comments URL only points to a Web page, not a RSS feed. Too late, I need to go to sleep.

the old apple help system was the best freaking help system I've ever used. the new one is so bad, it makes me want to cry. it's slow! if you're looking for something, open it. wait two minutes until it's open. enter search text. hit search. go drink a coffee and come back in the evening, maybe. well, actually, no need to come back, because in 99% of all cases, it has found 38913 absolutely useless documents that have nothing to do at all with what you entered.

and don't get me started on balloon help. that thing ruled! your e-mail-application has some weird setting in its preferences panel and you want to know what it does? in mac os x, open help viewer, wait, enter... but you know the drill. in 9: activate balloons, move the cursor over the item, finished.

If that e-mail application was MacOS X savvy, then you wouldn't need to turn on anything to get help, as help tags would appear when you hovered over something for a moment =). And if that wasn't enough (and the program implemented it), you could hit command and a get longer help tag.

I've never seen these longer tags, and she short ones are so short, they're totally useless!

Appleguide [the extension] was an amazing ram hog.

LKM: Yea, I'm afraid that not many people use the longer tags (this is mostly because Interface Builder doesn't support them). And if the short ones suck, then yell at the developer, it's not like they don't have room for something longer than "Push to dismiss this dialog" =p.

I'm just glad I'm not using any Microsoft apps. I remember that on Windows, the tags quite often contain the *same* text as the buttons they are appearing on. For example, the "Print" button would have a tag that says "Print". Oh well, off topic, I guess.

Balloon help still looks cooler, though ;-)