Re: Xcode - An Apple Embarrassment
Re: Xcode - An Apple Embarrassment
- Subject: Re: Xcode - An Apple Embarrassment
- From: Brian Barnes <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2012 12:40:01 -0500
On 3/2/2012 12:07 PM, Fritz Anderson wrote:
And here's an example of how different people have different priorities.
On 2 Mar 2012, at 9:38 AM, Brian Barnes wrote:
3) The tab pane window contains the navigation tree, the console, and the info pane
3) The navigation/console/info panes should exist outside the tab pane (and the tabs should only cover the area of the tab pane.)
I'll restrain myself from the general tone of hysteria, but I believe this isn't how it should work at all.
Suppose your screen isn't infinitely wide. Suppose you want to wire up a XIB. You'll need:
* The XIB outline fully extended.
* An editor containing the XIB.
* An assistant editor containing the counterpart header.
* The Inspector area.
These things take up screen width. Depending on your style, a lot of screen width. And you're working with a 13" MacBook Air. I've actually done this, with a modicum of comfort.
What you don't need:
* Any navigator. It takes up width (depending on your purpose, such as examining error messages or search results, quite a lot of width). You can get by with the jump bar, particularly if you keep your XIBs in a single group. (Yes, I wish Xcode's jump bars would not irretrievably drop context.)
Now suppose you also debug code. For debugging, you need:
* A navigator, for stack traces, or to refer to other files.
* The Debug area, which doesn't figure into this discussion because it doesn't take up width.
You do not need:
* The Inspector area.
* An assistant editor.
Your proposal is that whenever you use a tab to switch tasks, you should have to manually reconfigure the navigator, the inspector, the debugger, and the assistant. Every time you switch files.
Forgive me, but I think that's crazy.
_Xcode isn't TextMate. Not being TextMate is not a bug._ The two applications serve different functions. Just because they both have features named "tabs," that does not oblige Apple to have Xcode's feature do no more than TextMate's. Plain-text editors switch among files. Xcode switches among tasks. Those are different functions, and it's confusing only if you expect an IDE to have no more responsibilities than a text editor.
— F
This falls under the 90/10 rule. 90% of my time I'm navigating files.
10% of my time I'm debugging (actually, I hardly ever use the debugger,
but that's just me.) Being annoyed by a bad interface 90% of the time
beats 10% of the time.
Also, there are a couple good solutions:
1) Give us some auto-hide options. Go to a debug code, auto hide the
navigation.
2) Make the navigation pane consistent for type. If you are in a file,
you see the same navigation pane. If you go into a debugger, you see a
different one.
Let me give you an example I encounter all the time where the switching
navigation pane is a hassle. Do a find in files, which I do all the
time. Every time I double-click to get a new tab (I want them all
open), the navigator gets replaced and the find in files disappears! I
have to switch back to the older tab to get the find in files back!
There's no way that's a good idea, even if it's frustrating to see the
navigation pane while debugging.
Again: There is NO OTHER development environment that works this way.
Not Netbeans, not eclipse, not MSVC. That should tell you something :)
[>] Brian
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