On 13-Mar-2011, at 7:48 PM, Stephen Hershey wrote:
But I have see list of dropped features, and some items looks strange.
* no way to complex single file.
wow. This for 10-15 years feature of CodeWarrior and than Xcode.
Visual many years did not have it and was blamed.
Now Visual have it, but Xcode tema have decide go down ... Sense?
Given that the fix-it feature of Xcode 4 provides "live" warnings & errors as you type, why do you feel that you need single file compile?
j o a r
In general, I don't what to know whether my code compiles correctly until *I* believe that it is ready to compile correctly. This is especially true when I rough in some pseudo-code and then gradually refine it. Of course, there may be some tricks I can use to defeat the "live" warnings & errors function, such as putting all code I consider unready for compilation inside comments. However, a good tool should not force me to play such games.
How about allowing developers to enable / disable the 'fix-it' feature as they see fit, and adding back explicit GUI support for single-file compilation?
I'm getting used to the live warnings but I wish it were a little less live. I've found myself typing as fast as possible because every time I stop to think a bunch of red error symbols populate the margin and it gets a little distracting. I've played around turning it on and off in editors mode but when it's off I feel like I'm wasting something and when it's on I feel like it's all over me. I'm not sure however what a good balance is here so I appreciate the XCode team probably finds it hard to strike too. I'd rather like to pick my own delay (10 seconds is about right for me).
One thing I do like about XCode 4 is the much more consistent way that build settings are specified, they encapsulate product+devkit+debug/release, I have lots of projects where I have an OS X command line tester for my iOS project, switching between those on 3.x always seemed to need a lot of individual settings management, now I can just say 'build that one' and it does. I spend a lot less time Cmd-Tab'bing between windows too, which is good, 3.x meant whatever I tried windows started to multiply.
The bad for me is probably screen real estate, I code on Macbook Pro and even with the hi-res screen I have to constantly hide and display the various navigators or I don't have enough room to see what I'm doing. That's especially noticeable when editing XIBs for iPad, there was never enough room even in IB, now you get barely 2/3 of the screen shown, I may have to move to a tear-off for that.
I neither love nor hate XCode 4. I spent the time reading the transition guide and stuck with it through a few days of pain and can now drive it as well as I drove 3.x. The underlying project navigation is much improved and makes way more sense, the actual editing experience .. perhaps I'll grow to love it more, if I had a bigger screen I already would.
I would say that repository support has been a bit troublesome for me. Remote svn+ssh repositories have performed rather poorly and I've given up on those for the time being and gone back to my local home-network one. Also the IB integration sometimes does odd things, won't let me select things etc. I put those things down to issues which will be fixed as bug reports flow in.
I think XCode 4 is at least as good at XCode 3 and shows a lot of promise for the future as it evolves and I learn how best *I* want to use it.