Inside Apple's new Xcode 4 development tool - Page 2

Not new at all. The Lotus Designer tool has this type of interface, and has for years. It's a very intuitive interface in a three pane view, with app events and objects in the left, the GUI in the top right pane, and the code in the bottom right. I'm VERY happy that they've done this. I was having a very hard time adapting to XCode as everything I seemed to need was somewhere else in the GUI. This is a very welcome change.

Although I find adapting to C very easy, I'm having a horrible time of it trying to figure out how to link GUI to code, where it was dead simple in the Lotus Designer. Hopefully this will make things easier. I can't stick in a command prompt for my code forever and now that I've branched out, I'm getting lost.

In the WWDC 2010 Sessions Videos which you have to be a Developer member.

To be clear, unpaid members can grab them, too.

I dint know, is this a "hello world" app?

Dave

I haven't seen XCode 4 yet but will take your account in mind when trying to adjust to it.

Frankly I've never seen anything as ugly as ugly as the combo of XCode and interface builder. I've never gotten the hang of it and have found that building an interface in code is often easier. The platform is just completely unlike just about every IDE out there and for the life of me I don't know why it is so complex.

Of course it might not be complex but rather I haven't oriented my mind to it. It's possible but I blame that on the lack of any good tutorials that explain what is going on. It is almost like Apple doesn't want you to know how the damn thing works. It is just a disgusting piece of software.




Dave

To be perfectly clear, an unpaid member is still a member.

I learned the hardway not to do Python development in XCode. It got really nasty before I realized I could rely on indentation. So I understand what you are asking here, but can't answer your question.

Ruby might be supported though as Apple seems to be very fond of that language. MacRuby has come a long way and is supported in XCode today. Frankly I don't know if Apple has long term goals for Python but it is obvious that Ruby is being looked after.

In any event I'd like to extend your question by asking what is the condition of Fortran support? No I don't have any intention of using it myself, it is just a desire to support open source software that uses Fortran.


Dave

I think the guys over at Apress for example, and the thousands of us that use it would suggest otherwise.

Thanks, that is good info.

To me it's a real shame Apple didn't make a big deal about this at the last keynote. Admittedly there's absolutely nothing original in this and to anyone who's a developer for Windows is probably reading this and think wtf we've had all this stuff for the last decade, and wtf tool's help manage memory, you still manually manage memory! But at least Apple has finally got the message, the reason people want to use 3rd party tools to develop iPhone apps is because XCode sucks, and now their finally doing something about it.

However, all that being said, at the same time as me thinking this is great there starting to catch up. Whenever I've had the conversation of XCode sucks compared to Visual Studio, I've always respected the fact that it's a different type of development and the people want their tools to work in different ways. So maybe lot's of Mac/iOS developers are going to hate this. Hope not as that would also mean my side of the argument was right and Visual Studio rules compared to XCode but only time will tell.

Perhaps Xcode is the only IDE you have used for a long time. Because if you regularly used Eclipse, Visual Studio and common text editors like UltraEdit, you would know exactly what I was talking about.

The programs mentioned above are the "gold standard" .NET and Java IDEs, which are the languages used by the majority of companies, and therefore the majority of developers. And through some "invisible hand" these IDEs (and common programmer editors) have settled on some de facto standards about what things are called ("scripts" not "schemes") and common key shortcuts (e.g. TAB to autocomplete). There are even common window layouts where logs are always in a certain place on the screen relative to the code, as are class hierarchies.

So when a professional developer downloads Xcode at home to see what all the fuss is about, it seems to him that everything is needlessly renamed and moved around. And not the kind of "pleasant surprise" difference that comes from innovation (which everyone must be in favor of), but the frustrating difference that comes from the pseudo-innovation of changing the name of something.

Then 3 hours later this professional developer, who has solved problems for many organizations, and could probably write some great iPhone apps, throws up his hands and says "What a POS," and goes back to what he was doing. Do we ever wonder why there are less than 50 really amazing iPad apps, and the rest are just filler? Is there really that little imagination in the world? I think it's because most App Store developers are amateurs. The professionals find that Apple tools do not follow the standards of their profession and lose interest in the platform. I think the Xcode team need to get out more.

This link to the Scottish Ruby Conf. makes it quite clear that MacRuby is likely to have a role to play in both Mac OS and iOS development.

http://bit.ly/b0rxMi

Looking at the fact, that the device is just sold for two month 50 really amazing iPad Apps is huge.

I haven't seen 50 really amazing Java, .Net Apps (like e.g. iWork, Omnigraffle, 3D-Games etc. ) on a comparable device until now. So some Pros seem to be able to deal with it while Java and .Net aren't a free ticket for pro applications.

I also have a hard time to get used to XCode although I'm developing software for many years. I can understand your pain and I have great hopes for XCode 4.

That aside it's no good style to degrade other developers which are able to deal with it as amateurs in order to emphasize yourself as pro.

I haven't seen any of your applications, but I instantly hope that it's not only your arrogance that can be labeled as pro.

I wish Apple would stop messing with the UI of Xcode, and simply make their debugger work. The debugger is so broken, I don't even know where to begin. Breakpoints sometimes don't work, watchpoints don't work, expressions don't work. The debugger crashes trying to view C++ objects.. etc etc. It's a complete cluster-f*ck. And here they sit playing around with UI elements. Its pathetic.


And, least anyone think I'm just venting, I had a friend that went to work for Apple on Final Cut Pro. I asked him "Hey, how do you deal with the fact that Xcode's debugger is so broken?" He said "We mostly just use printfs." This is an Apple engineer, admitting that they can't even use their own tools to debug their own products. Does anyone realize how completely messed up this is????

Improving the debugger is exactly what they are doing. What do you think LLDB is all about? The truth is that GCC and GDB are a pain to deal with. They're designed as command line tools and weren't designed with Obj-c in mind.

You're making the assumption that the folks working to improve the workflow would be the same guys working on debugger. Bug compiler/debugger folks are not typically UI types. So it happens in parallel.

As a developer, I think it is important for Apple to keep improving their workflow (along with their performance of core tools like compiler/debugger). And that appears to be exactly what they have done with Xcode. The LLVM compiler is really, really fast compared to GCC (even on 3.2). The added support for C++ is useful to a lot of people. And it sounds like the new LLDB will also be really fast compared to GDB.

Just to clarify, the proper capitalization is capital X, small c. See product About box.

I know there is a tendency to use camel-case by default among developers, especially if you are new to the platform -- but the name is not camel-cased.

Debugging has nothing to do with side-by-side all-in-one views. It has to do with the debugging tools being intelligent.

LLDB is a leap forward and as it grows not only Apple but all LLVM based platforms will benefit from improved solutions.

http://lldb.llvm.org/features.html

As a heavy 10 year Visual Studio user, Xcode has been better in code completion and debugging by far since Xcode 3. I abhor Eclipse. Its horrendous.

Maybe it's just me, but I find the notion of a language that depends on indentation as syntax deeply disturbing.

From what little I've seen of it so far, I think it'll be ok for iOS developers, but I'm not sure the all in one thing will work so well for Mac development, so, hopefully it's still an option to not have it all in one. Although, better integration of Project Builder and Interface Builder sounds like a good thing, in general.

Actually, I think the reason that most apps are not "amazing" on any platform (and I don't think iOS is any different here, except perhaps that there are more developers total than some platforms) is that there really aren't that many developers who are amazing. In any field, there aren't that many people who are amazing, and there are almost always fewer than think they are. There really is that little imagination in the world, combined with the skill and knowledge to turn it into something amazing.

I don't use eclipse for Java development, not being a Java developer, just for a few "scripting" languages, which it's ok for, but I can't for the life of me figure out why you have to install a plugin to enable line wrapping.

Would this qualify?

"SWIG-generated script bridging allows Python to access and control the public API of the debugger library."

See http://lldb.llvm.org/features.html

Heavily inspired by iTunes, apparently.

I hated that about FORTRAN, but I don't know enough to evaluate what you say.

Why do you find that disturbing?

It sounds to me that you want too badly for it to be like other IDEs. You need to stop this if you want to be able to use it effectively. Interface Builder is different because it's not a GUI Code generator like in other IDEs. It generates archived objects that are supported by the Obj-C runtime, and links them to IBOutlets in your code when the nib files are loaded by the runtime. I really don't know what you mean by "Apple doesn't want you to know how the damn thing works." It takes time to get the hang of it, but there's nothing that's actually mysterious about it - and it is explained in the documentation.

Interface Builder integrated into the IDE? Wow! Welcome to 1991! Only 19 more years to catch up with the rest of the development world.

Every other IDE has had that ability for about 15 years, it just isn't the default view.

The difference is probably because there is no "generated code" for the UI objects as opposed to stuff like the various SWT/Swing editors in Eclipse. There is no
construct. I have to admit that this is cleaner, but still not something groundbreaking in the IDE world.

I believe Xcode was one of the first, if not the first, IDE created. So you could say just as well that Microsoft and others didn't follow Apple's already established conventions.

Interface Builder is undeniably confusing. However, Apple has to tread carefully to avoid upsetting the huge mass of loyal Apple developers who already know the environment.

So far, I still find it less confusing to generate my interface by hand, probably because IB didn't even work when I did my first iPhone app.

D

It's pretty disturbing. Give me the beloved { } and ; any day, let me indent however I want to.

Anyways I'm sadly so procedural with my tinkerings in PHP and, don't laugh, kinda-object-oriented-ActionScript.

Should have paid more attention in my SmallTalk classes at university! Then maybe this newfangled object-oriented model-view-controller stuff will make more sense to me. Actually, it's not that new, I suppose, object-oriented languages have been around for a long time.

Speaking of university, on some of my assignments I got marked down for having too many comments in the code. Anyone had this problem? Also, why did they teach us Ada? Who uses that nowadays?

.....................................

In Soviet Russia, Code writes You.

How can a professor mark down a grade for providing too many comments? Though in practice, one has to balance the value of adding more comments with the time it takes away from adding additional functionality to the code, IMO there are rarely enough comments in source code. I think that any professor who marks down for too many comments is sending the wrong message to their students.

Regarding ADA, to the best of my knowledge ADA is still heavily used in the government sector in the USA, but I know of no other companies using it. Though it may not be heavily used, I have always found value in learning new programming languages since they can teach you to think differently about how to solve problems, which can greatly influence your productivity and the quality of what code you write.

No. Xcode is a modern replacement to ProjectBuilder.app which is nothing like what Xcode became.

OOA/OOD MVC Design Pattern from NeXT dates back to 1986.

Good Article, AI. Pitched just right for the general user. To the guy who said " yeah, it's called "blame", that is technical knowledge you posses which most readers wouldn't so the writer quite legitimately described the process. To the guy who suggested this article was "cribbed" from Apple's developer videos - it was written for the general user based on those videos which is not the same thing; so good job once again.

And no I dont work for AI, or have anything to do with them, I just know how hard it is to get general technical geeky stuff across to the normal user.

On the general subject - I much prefer Visual Studio to xCode 3. It is way ahead, and I mostly use xCode day by day ( not always) - in fact I started as a Mac dev out of college. So my use of this IDE goes back to it's Project Builder days...

Anything that gets me out of multi-window hell is good, although I fear I need a wider screen for 4.

Looking forward to it.

Ideas and Vision aren't taught in Computer Science curriculum, anymore than the idea for solving various mechanical engineering problems. The solutions for new applications come from and is limited by the imagination and experience of the engineer(s).

Yes... kids often have the imagination but not the skill, and adults often have the skill but not the vision. Perhaps to become skilful, you must repeat the same patterns of action over and over to perfect them, and in doing so your neural connections get locked-in and unable to go off on flights of fancy any more.

Yeah, this was about 10+ years ago. I think code was always better documented back then. I think in hindsight she may not have marked me down a grade, maybe she was trying to make a point about, as you mention, balancing functionality and readability with coding efficiency. I'm no pro coder, but I do appreciate the creative nature of coding, perhaps I was a bit flamboyant with my commenting, if such a thing is possible. Today, definitely there's way, way too little documentation of projects. Most of us have experienced having to take over projects and having real trouble figuring things out because of lack of commenting and documentation.


Well, the main thing I remember from ADA95 was our assignment to write a recursive function. Like, a function that calls itself somewhere in that function. That kinda blew my mind at the time. I was like, "Whoaaaa". A few years later I tried it in ASP (before .NET really came about) for listing the contents of a directory. Because you got to recursively go through directories you find in the directory, and so on.

In the end after university I drifted strongly towards visual design and Flash-oriented stuff with only a dash of ASP/SQLServer and PHP/MySQL. But I think you do have a point, the different languages we were exposed to made us think about problem solving, creativity and the concepts of computer science.

I am quite curious about iOS development but the problem is in Malaysia, where I am right now, there's Macs and iPhone 3GS's but iPads and iPhone4 will be very difficult to obtain even when officially launched a few months from now, due to heavy, heavy demand. I'm wondering whether to devote attention and time to this area. Feels like I'm behind the 8-ball / behind the curve on this one.

A designer/artist friend I knew said, "I wish I could learn all the techniques to be really good at drawing, and then forget it all..."

If you are a iphone developer then you should have gotten an email with the link to the videos.
P.s Xcode 4 looks sweet. I cant wait to get my hands on it.