Tuesday, October 4, 2011

App Code Beta

One of the difficulties that I've had with XCode is that the SDE is not as slick as I'm used to. When combined with some of the peculiarities of the language, it is more painful to code in this than in Eclipse for Java or Visual Studio for C# (especially with the Resharper plugin). I've found that JetBrains, the creators of IntellJ and Resharper have created a SDE called AppCode for Objective C. I've tried it and it is far easier to use for most things than XCode (either 3 or 4). Right now the Beta is free, and you can sign up for a 50% discount on the final product.

I highly recommend it.  The smart code completion is far better, it can automatically make properties for you, it has far better refactoring, and navigation.

The only downsides are that it doesn't support interface builder, or modifying a SQL-Lite database.  Also if you want to modify your project settings you still need to boot up XCode.

XCode 4 static libraries in a project.

I'm actually trying to get back into IOS development. I was attempting to get my static library to work properly in XCode 4. Apple does not make it easy to do this. I found a really good blog article that helps with this. Using Open Source Static Libraries in XCode 4. While written for open source libraries, it works great with my personal static library as well.