Care to elaborate? I've heard good things, too, about Visual Studio C#. What is it specifically that you finder better? What things are worse?
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iOS Xcode is a nightmare!
- Thread starter moonman239
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Care to elaborate? I've heard good things, too, about Visual Studio C#. What is it specifically that you finder better? What things are worse?
I was at an training session once and there was this one female Asian speaker, maybe about 30, who had just published an iOS book. She said "I moved into the iOS platform because I knew it would be so disruptive to the industry. But I was from a web programming background and getting started was hard because I didn't know ObjC. In fact, I didn't even know C." 
After hearing her, I decided to never complain about a learning curve again
After hearing her, I decided to never complain about a learning curve again
I'm sure once you get into doing advanced stuff they are much a like/both have good and bad points. However it was the stuff that is meant to be easy that made xCode look bad (for me). In VS you add elements and double clicking them loads their routine - simple. In xCode that operation takes too many more steps - just things like that - basics really. I also found the UI element properties window to be much less useful at setting things up. In visual studio the plethora or options saved me so much time when I had lots of UI elements that needed sorting.
I agree that I haven't spent as long with xCode and i'm sure you can get used to I, all i'm really saying is that for me it had a vastly steeper learning curve.
VS represents it as "containment": a visual element "contains" its routine. Xcode (note spelling) represents it as "connection": a visual element is "connected to" its routine in another component.
I don't know if one or the other is more powerful, flexible, whatever. There's probably a certain amount of "X can be represent by Y" that goes in both directions, kind of like how any Turing-equivalent computer system can simulate any other Turing-equivalent system, it's only a question of representation.
I liken the "connection" metaphor to the rear panel of an A/V amplifier. It has lots of jacks, which you connect cables to, and the other end of the cable connects to another component. You can move connections without having to move the component itself, simply by unplugging the cable and plugging it into a different jack. For example, I can move the satellite video source to VID2 simply by moving the connecting cable. I don't have to physically move the satellite receiver box.
The "containment" metaphor is more like plugging cards into a computer motherboard, although technically that's really a bussed connection architecture.
Note that there are some 3rd party tools, and even online tools, that will allow you to mostly just point-and-click to build a complete Xcode project for a simple custom app without having to do a lot of typing.
Xcode is more targeted towards serving the power user developer. The easier and more tutorial stuff is left to other parties.
There's already a thread in this forum listing several app making tools:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1364694/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1364694/
Really a nightmare
Just downloaded the latest version of Xcode and tried to follow the first assignment of "Coding together,,," in iTunesU, got ~10 Xcode crashes in an hour. All the crashes related to story board. Redo and redo the same stuff and finally got the simple calculator working.
Anybody else has such experience? I wrote 10+ years of program, from Turbo C to Visual Studio, but never encounter such a weird IDE...
Just downloaded the latest version of Xcode and tried to follow the first assignment of "Coding together,,," in iTunesU, got ~10 Xcode crashes in an hour. All the crashes related to story board. Redo and redo the same stuff and finally got the simple calculator working.
Anybody else has such experience? I wrote 10+ years of program, from Turbo C to Visual Studio, but never encounter such a weird IDE...
Those videos are probably based on an older version of Xcode / iOS SDK. It's important to be using the same tools as your educational resources (or understand enough of the differences that you can make the needed adjustments, and are comfortable doing so).
I have an idea. How about Apple makes the APIs available to Web developers? If they're not going to scrap the SDK, they could at least do that.