Max Greatest Annoyances #7: the documentation is fragmented, full of typos and somewhat outdated

This is a big one. I was introduced to Max (relatively) long ago, I think it was Max5 (maybe, even Max4?). And one of the most appealing feature of Max at this time was excellent up to date documentation with beautiful interactive examples. Since then Max matured in many ways, but (honestly) I’m totally not satisfied with the current state of Max documentation, which seems to be left in 2008.

Here are the main problems:
1. The documentation is fragmented. Looks like there is nobody at Cycling’74, who is looking at the documentation from an ‘eagle eye’, maintaining the logical overall structure of the docs: the new information is often added without updating the already existing referring pages, docs may appear in unexpected sections etc. (I think it is a very bad sign when you need to point a newbie asking questions to an external resources instead of Max docs). There are good new ideas, which are not supported anymore. For example, in Max 7 docs there was a label ‘Introduced in Max 7.0.0’ which helped users to understand when this feature was introduced. Why this feature is not supported in the following releases for Max 7.* and Max 8.*?

2. The documentation is outdated. Tutorials are often using non efficient and even deprecated objects and techniques. There is an infamous TEXT_HERE placeholder here and there in the docs.
3. Too many typos/broken links/errors. (Personally, I have sent around 100 corrections to the docs to Cycling’74 support). I’m pretty sure there is an urgent need of proof-reading the docs.

And finally: it is exactly a half year since the release of Max 8 and there is still no online Max 8 docs? :-0

I think it is time to restructure and update docs once again. Yes, this is difficult and time-consuming process, but I think Max deserves it!

Max Greatest Annoyances #1: messages are not finalised by pressing Enter
Max Greatest Annoyances #2: Max tabbed window grows in size every time you open/close the sidebar
Max Greatest Annoyances #3: new objects are created right on top of the others
Max Greatest Annoyances #4: newly created attrui objects size is too small
Max Greatest Annoyances #5: it is possible to save a patch using one of the ‘reserved’ names
Max Greatest Annoyances #6: difficult to transform (change, re-instantiate) graphical Max objects
Max Greatest Annoyances #8: outdated JavaScript version used in js and jsui objects