Xcode Experiences

Whilst at WWDC (2)

Though it seems like I'm slagging on XCode, I'd like to point out that it seems to be a reasonable IDE; it just has some rough edges.

More edges:

1) If you control-click on a word to bring up a contextual menu, it doesn't select the word under the cursor.

2a) If you do a multiple-file find, the results have two panes, the top pane shows the files+lines where the match occurred,
and the bottom shows the file that you've got selected in the top pane. Well, if you do a find, look at a couple of files, and then do another find, the results of the second find are put in the top pane, but the bottom pane still shows whatever file you were looking at in the last set of find results.

2b) If, on the other hand, you use the documentation browser to search for stuff, it gives you a similar two-pane result window. However, in this case, clicking on one of the "hits" in the top pane shows the result in the bottom pane _and_ moves the focus back to the bottom pane. So, you can't arrow through the results.

3) Sometimes XCode gets into a state where it fails to save changed files. You can hit cmd-S, or choose Save from the menu, but it won't save the file, and it doesn't give you an error. (The little UI indications that the file is 'dirty' stay lit, and building will use the old contents of the file). This seems to happen more often if you interrupt a build before it's done.

4) XCode compiles really, really, fast - if you've got a whole lab full of fast machines to distribute compile jobs to.

posted by Marshall @ 3:03 PM