Daniel and Manton talk about the fast sell-out of WWDC 2011 tickets, NSConference UK, SXSW Interactive, and our heartfelt, possibly premature opinions on Xcode 4.
Download (MP3, 40 minutes, 19 MB)
Links for the show:
- WWDC — the Apple developer conference
- NSConference – the UK Mac and iOS conference put on by Steve Scott
- SXSW – South by Southwest, the Austin interactive, music, and film conference
- SecondConf – An indie, Chicago-based Mac and iOS conference
- Pear Note – Note-taking utility from Useful Fruit Software
- Xcode 4 – The next-generation Mac and iOS IDE from Apple
- AppCode – A new ObjC IDE from the makers of IntelliJ
Daniel Jalkut is the founder of Red Sweater Software. His most popular products are MarsEdit, Black Ink, FastScripts, and FlexTime.
Manton Reece is the founder of Riverfold Software. He builds e-book software for Ingram Digital and has 2 independent products: Clipstart and Wii Transfer.
A competitor for Xcode would be really good. It worked great for Eclipse vs. Netbeans vs. IntelliJ in the Java world (not a sarcasm).
Interesting episode, especially the part about Xcode and AppCode. One thing that popped up while I listened to the discussion was that maybe skipping the IDE completely could be an interesting idea.
I’ve been thinking for a while now about moving away from Xcode, write all my source code in Vim, TextMate, Vico or any other dedicated editor, use the CMake build system, debug directly from the command line with gdb and so on.
While it may be a bit tricky to get started doing it that way I feel the temptation to loose my bounds to Xcode. I’m sure that Xcode 4 will become better over time but I’m not convinced yet. I’m happy with Xcode 3.2 but I don’t think that it will be updated for newer OS releases so eventually I’ll have to move away from it anyway.
Do you think that this could be a viable solution for a Mac and/or iOS developer?
Hey Guys,
A few notes:
- Xcode is now in the App Store but if you’re in either the iOS or Mac developer programs, you still get it for free via the Web.
- If you’re stuck, there are also several WWDC vids on what’s new. That said, I don’t think any provide all the info you asked for on the show… and you’re right, the Transition Guide is basically a joke. A lot is missing.
I’m one of the people that digs Xcode 4. I wonder how much of this is slanted to Mac vs. iOS work. 90% of my work is on iOS with very little Mac stuff.
I love LLVM 2.0 and it’s integration with the new editor (Fix It, better autocompletion (pretty bad on 3.x). Schemes have simplified my on-device vs Simulator builds – the 3.x setup was clearly never designed to handle iOS requirements. We still can’t use LLDB for iOS yet but that looks like a nice improvement. I find debugging different threads or GCD queues much easier with the new UI, including being able to hide threads that don’t have my code running. It’s a bunch of little things but I find myself happier. Workspaces make combining projects far more flexible, plus they can be shared.
Some stuff, like the new documentation viewer, is terrible and needs to be improved. The app still sucks massive CPU cycles sometimes for pretty much no good reason. Still, those things have improved in the point releases since 4.0.
Many developers won’t try preview releases of the toolchain. Going GM forced that issue and I’d expect (hope?) that things start to improve faster now that it is the ‘official’ toolkit.
4.1dacted also seems to iron out some annoyances. See you at WWDC!
Hunter
I’ll move to Xcode when it beats my vi/autotools/cmake combo.