| Ruslan, you have been with us a long time, Valentina has a long and well-established reputation on the Mac OS X platforms, so you ought to know these three things by now:
1) Every Apple engineering team is driven by multiple and sometimes-conflicting agendas. With dev tools, we have to keep pace with Mac OS X, support the platform's imperatives (like garbage collection and 64-bit), be there for brand new initiatives (like Intel and iPhone), continue to improve performance and reliability, and all the while add features and enhancements requested by developers. We cannot do everything that everybody asks us to (and, in keeping with Apple's design philosophy, we do not just throw in every requested feature.)
2) There is no "moral" element to our planning and decision-making. This is a business and we assign resources to the tasks that we thing will benefit our business as a whole. Perhaps this is a language issue, and you think we believe that tabs do not belong in a development environment? I assure you this is not the case. There is nothing philosophical preventing us from implementing tabs. We have both technical and practical reasons that we haven't retrofitted them into Xcode as of yet.
3) Finally, you have worked with us long enough to know that we do not conduct the design of future products in public, nor will we comment on what will or will not be in any specific future release. "We hope to have that in a future version" is about as definite as we get.
We do listen to what developers have to say about our products, both in these forums and in Radar. We have over 6,000 feature and enhancement requests for Xcode at the moment (not counting duplicates); over 1,100 of these originated from developers. We feel we have a useful amount of feedback from developers on what they want in Xcode.
Chris |