Apple’s XCode 3.0 preview page is a cornucopia of new stuff that I somehow missed all day - until now.
No doubt this is the stuff that everyone at WWDC is talking about. This page represents no less than 3 or 4 really significant changes and some really nice details. Here’s a hit list that I haven’t seen in any of the coverage I’ve been looking at today:
Garbage Collection in ObjC. I’m curious about the details, but I’m also certain that it’s a good thing. I really just think this is a no-brainer and we’ll all be asking how we lived without it in a year.
Project Snapshots - lets you fiddle with projects and go back to a good state without involving SVN. Nice, it’s like Word Versions for XCode. Handy, but a little puzzling why it seems to be duplicating version control functionality.
Research Assistant - A ‘lightweight window’ for reference and API docs. Long overdue, and sounds really handy. Basically what I asked for in a Dashboard Widget long ago.
DTrace for Mac OS - this is an extremely useful and powerful dynamic tracing framework from Sun - with a DSL for tracing called “D”, and I’m really surprised to see it on OS X. This is nice.
Leveraging DTrace, XRay visualizes program behavior. I think DTrace itself is more interesting, based on my experiences with visualization of parallel program behavior and developers (generally allergic) reaction to it, but it’s interesting to see Apple give it a serious try. The ability to “track UI events” sounds tantalizingly useful.
A new text editor - apparently it can shade text backgrounds according to scope. This could either be a non-starter or really great. I think some will love it after a while and some will hate it immediately. Which are you? Oh, it also does iChat-style popups on your breakpoints. Okay.
Finally, Interface Builder 3.0, where they spend a lot of time talking about some extra palletized stuff you can drop in, which is all well and good, but then they drop the boom in the last two sentences: “Interface Builder 3.0 makes localization and diffing easier. And you can include your NIBs in global refactoring tasks.” Whoa! That sound you just heard? It was me from 2004, cheering them on.
Update:
s/XCode/Xcode/- thanks.
11:27 pm August 7, 2006
under computers, programming, wwdc
Agreed: Xcode (and IB) v3.0 really seems to be like a godsend to me. But please correct your post so that Xcode is correctly spelt :P ! Thanks in advance, Michael.
“Project Snapshots” are actually a really, really handy feature. IntelliJ IDEA (awesome Java IDE) has the concept of local history, which goes beyond this, to capture every single change you make, project-wide. If you make a mistake, you can scroll through diffs of the files and revert to a particular revision or a “label” (akin to the snapshot).
I think it’s really meant to be used when working on a task that isn’t quite finished (and so you don’t want to commit to svn), so you can revert back to a working state if you mess things up (like… uh… stuffing up build settings).
IntelliJ sure does sound like a handy IDE. It’s such a shame Java has so many good tools and is so little fun to work in (for me).
On a related note - doesn’t that sound like the kind of thing every single program should have? Not just Undo, but visualizations of Undo and even better, a standard way of displaying and browsing user actions, and allowing named milestones along the way. That’s what ought to replace saving…
WWDC comments
Here are some thoughts on what we’ve seen at WWDC so far… Ordinarily I wouldn’t pay much attention to the tower announcement because, I’ve been reasonably happy with Apple’s laptops since I’ve been back on OS X. However, RAM and fast disks …