We took a vote around the office today and the unwavering consensus across all of our iOS developers is that no one is happy with Xcode 4.
Apart from having to relearn text editing, project configuration elements and just about everything else, the settings you need to be able to get to easily in order to make, build and run an app are hard to find. Particularly frustrating is how difficult it is to find the targets in a project. In fact, it took us 10 minutes to create a new build configuration for distribution when it used to take us the same amount of time as it does to sneeze.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, rather than having separate buttons ala Xcode v3.2.5, the “Static Analyzing” and “Profiling” tools are given given equal weight in the menu as “Build” and “Run” despite the fact that we’ll use them only a fraction of the time.
Our biggest complaint, however, might just have to be the variations in the key bindings from the last version. Every time our hands come off the keyboard/mouse is precious wasted time especially when you’re working on multiple apps at once, all of which have crazy timelines. The one that irks us the most are the new key bindings for jumping between the header and implementation– no matter what you try, for some reason you can’t set it back to “option-command-up” the way it used to be.
To be fair, Xcode 4 has been available for less than 48 hours so perhaps we won’t feel as strongly about it after continued use, but so far we all agree: this is one scenario where we feel that change is not a good thing.
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