Xcode 4

There are two great things about Xcode 4 that mean I had to download and try it right away

  1. It runs side-by-side on the same machine as Xcode 3.2
  2. It uses the exact same project file format

This hasn’t been the case in the last few major upgrades from what I remember, and I was really glad to read that in the release notes.

My first impressions after an hour or so:

Putting the view in Assistant mode (Opt-Cmd-Enter) is really nice. Shows the .m when editing the .h and vice versa. When editing an .xib file, it shows the ViewController.

Keeping the Interface Builder dialogs organized as parts of a single window is also a big win. It’s confusing having them as free dialogs. Specifically, having the parts of the main dialog (File’s Owner, First Responder, View, etc) as just part of the chrome (and always visible) is nice.

I think I’ll really like the Log Navigator — especially for debugging. I am constantly clearing the console, but this saves each one in a separate view so I can keep them around.

The Project Navigator is so much cleaner (replaces the Groups and Files tree). It always felt like Xcode just stuffed everything there instead of organizing it elsewhere in the GUI. However, it took me a long time to figure out where Build Settings were (click the project name in the Project Navigator), but it seems obvious now.

Build and Analyze still doesn’t find dealloc omissions of retained property releases. I would like the default to be set to finding these.

Some keyboard shortcut changes. The GUI is so radically different, so this is excusable. For the most part, things are the same.

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