For reasons unbeknownst to me, Xcode has been seriously misbehaving lately. In most cases the problems had to do with its buggy parser/writer and required me to open the .xcodeproj files with TextMate and fix them. One example, that tortured me the other day, had to do with spurious compiler flags added there for no good reason, including one time when i386 compilation was set although the GUI did no reflect that and which — as I didn’t have the libraries for i386 installed on my G5 — caused my software to suddenly stop compiling pissing me off immensely and causing me to lose time tracking what on earth had gone wrong. Xcode 3.0, the version that is shipping with Leopard this autumn seems much nicer with amazing features (see DTrace), but I’d prefer Apple to iron out all the bugs in Xcode as well as a number of frameworks in OS X (Core Data for example) that shipped prematurely before touting new and improved functionality for the OS and its development tools.
What I’d really like to see would be a good, comprehensive API for external editors to integrate/interface with Xcode. This would be proper integration, unlike what we’ve got today; currently, using an external editor makes development very problematic with Xcode 2.4.x.
The ‘Xcode Editor API’ would allow me to use my editor of choice (currently TextMate) and not break all the nifty debugging/breakpoint/CodeSense features built into Xcode. And while for some CodeSense is not that useful once you get comfortable with the API, but setting breakpoints are debugger integration are huge productivity boosters I’m not willing to sacrifice.
Knowing Apple this is probably not going to happen anytime soon; they like to do everything themselves so the only thing we’re (hopefully) going to get is a slightly better, but still not exactly good, editor and lots of new features with their fair share of bugs. Sigh.
