The app is really good in terms of GUI-design and general responsiveness, it is definitely unmatched on the Mac platform. However, I do have some complaints to make now that a new paid update is released. There is nothing worth paying $19.99 for in the Dash 3 update if you already have Dash 2.
If however the developers decide to better the quality of many essential docsets such as the MySQL docset I might consider purchasing the upgraded version despite the almost 4x increase in price. What makes the app after all are the docsets themselves. If I were them I'd focus on improving the indexing and theming of the current docsets.
Idk if this is relevant or not, but I also own the iOS version of Dash and most docstets are definitely not fit for such a small screen as the iphone 5 screen for example. The Dash team should focus on optimizing their current docsets to fit a small mobile device.
What they should improve is:
- Zooming, pages should not be zoomed out. Long words should be word-wrapped, and in worst cases cut in half. (It's better to cut a function name for example in half rather than having the whole page show on half of the screen, and have the other half of the screen blank.). They should also avoid fixed sizes on images. Make them small and make it so that the user can click the image to enter a new ios storyboard-page where he/she can zoom and look closely at the image. Tables should be wrapped in a container so that the data doesn't overflow.
- Minimize the file size of the docsets. I know that Dash 3 has a functionality to handle archived docsets (I hope it will be implemented in iOS too), which is a step into the right direction. But there is still much room for improvements in the docstets themselves. For example: Why is the "Drupal 8" docset 500+ MB in large? That's absolutely crazy, and quite frankly not something you would like to have on your phone. To fix this they should remove unnecessary footers/headers from the pages and optimize the HTML itself a little. Btw, some Drupal 8 doc pages are absolutely unreadable in iOS, especially pages that have tables in them.
The last thing they should improve is page lengths. Some pages, such as the ones in the MySQL docs, are really long and they are about many different functions. For example, the documentation about SELECT and UPDATE is on the same page. The page is probably thousands of lines long. In my opinion it should be split in several pieces to avoid accidentally scrolling to the wrong subject.
Don't let all the negativity in my review make you think this is a bad app, it's not. It's the best one out there and is the way to go if you need offline documentation on Mac OS X. However, as I described, there are some issues. If you need an all-in-one documentation app for Mac, get Dash despite what I wrote above it's the best you'll get.
But certainly avoid their iOS version until they fix what I mentioned above, that is where you will encounter most the problems. That is because many documentation pages are simply not optimized for the mobile world yet so the Dash team have to put increased effort on making them readable on the iphone.
Summary: Dash is getting really pricey and if they want to justify the price-increase they have to fix their existing docs, both on Mac and iOS.