On Oct 15, 2012, at 21:06 , Crispin Bennett < email@hidden> wrote: Good grief, I hope there won't be in the foreseeable future! Xcode 4 is elegant enough in its fundamentals that it surely has plenty of room to grow yet. I'd much rather Apple improved it incrementally (fixing stability, adding features), rather than start again.
I think Xcode violates a number of Apple's own human interface guidelines -- and I mean the big philosophical ones, not the little UI element ones:
-- Don't "wrap" non-interactive tools in a "GUI". There's no such thing as a GUI -- the interface is a set of behaviors, not a set of UI elements.
-- Don't try to solve every functional problem for every possible user. Choose what's most important to most people, and make the app do that.
-- Don't offer too much choice. If you have to offer the user lots of options, that just means you don't know what your app is for.
It seems to me that Xcode's abuse of these 3 principles (at least) is very deep, and -- abstractly -- the root of its current difficulties. I half-expected Xcode 4 to be the rewrite that dealt with all this, but it wasn't. It's a minority view, I'm sure, but I'm still waiting for the *in*flexible Xcode that doesn't give me so much flexibility but is a better app for all that.
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