The problem often seems to be that Apple will choose the most complicated yet half-assed solution to problems that shouldn't even merit much design time, or that have already been solved quite well by others. Witness the fact that there's not even an option to keep files sorted alphabetically in the treeview. What file browser on the planet doesn't do that? The workaround is a manually triggered sort, that you have to do over and over. Under what priority system does this become the FIRST design to implement? Then again, it comes from the company that gave us Finder, the only file browser that doesn't put folders where they belong: AT THE TOP.
Another result of this approach is that it turns people off to what should have been a step forward. The single-window design should have cleaned things up immensely, and saved the time formerly spent herding windows around the screen. Whee, we can actually minimize or resize Xcode now! And yet the implementation is so bizarre, not to mention overblown, that one wonders how they ever arrived at it. And for those who like floating windows, the tear-off tab option should have been acceptable (I'm going by people's comments); but again the implementation is defective.
They even got rid of time-saving enhancements, like the "switch to counterpart" button. Now you have to dig through a menu. And the "assistant" or whatever it is randomly decides to stop showing counterparts by default and switches to "manual" mode, showing arbitrary files when activated. Then when you hit a breakpoint, Xcode decides to switch the contents of the first editing pane to show it, even when it's already available in another pane. Come to think of it, I waste as much time cajoling Xcode to show the file I want in each pane as I would herding windows around. And Xcode 3's all-in-one view didn't mess up the editing panes anywhere near as much.
I used Visual C++ starting with version 1, continuing through Visual Studio's latest incarnation. Today it suffers from the same idiotic defects (and several more) that it did almost 20 years ago. But one thing it does far better than Xcode: UI management. It's incredible that the Xcode team would change the UI so radically, but ignore the example set by the dominant IDE and proven effective over many, many years:
They should go back and implement exactly this UI and work forward from there. Xcode has come a long way since Project Builder, and now does several things better than Visual Studio. I prefer Cocoa to MFC, and the far more standard environment. But Apple and the Xcode team need to abandon what appears to be a petty refusal to acknowledge that, occasionally, someone else has a better way of doing things.
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