[w10-1]

This is one of many such API.

I spent decades in Java land using open-source libraries, where the quality was broad and deep. An enticing demo usually meant it was good all the way down.

With Apple, though, a nice demo means you can do exactly what they did, but be blocked if you step off the happy path. Worse, each developer needs to get bruised because there's no publicly available list of bugs for an API.

I'm grateful to those who publish critiques of API's. It's a life saver.

[mpweiher]

With NeXTstep it was exactly the opposite: you could usually rearrange, recompose, override the pieces any way you wanted, including from scratch, but the demos and pre-built parts were of such quality that you didn't really want to.

But if you wanted: knock yourself out.

With the first version of Mac OS X, I was stunned that the high-level "convenience" APIs had capabilities that you couldn't actually replicate using the lower level APIs. And this seems to be getting worse. Fortunately with Swift we now have a type-system to enforce the "Apply way or the highway" attitude.