Some thoughts on recent Xcode versions

[Ivan Vučica]

[Small disclaimer, to shoo away the flames: This is in no way a demand list -- it is just one random person's thoughts on what made Xcode 3-era tools really nice. To this random person, at least.]

Why am I interested in Xcode3-style, and not Xcode{4,5}-style IDE? 

My first IDE on Mac was Xcode 3.1. I never seriously dealt with pre-3.1 Xcode or Project Builder. Xcode 4 and 5 seem to be hiding the fact that Xcode was/is/should be less an IDE and more of a build tool that can also be a nice editor and a nice IDE. 

Xcode 3 better respected the fact that I need more than one window while working on a project. For example, more than once did I make good use of the way "Get Info" worked for project files: I could compare properties of multiple projects very easily, while still looking at code of two or three files.

This was very, very important when maintaining OS X and iOS ports of several games in active development or at least maintenance...

If I were to use Xcode 3 today, the only things I would actively miss are: 

 a) better autocompletion, 

 b) ability to open .xib files internally allowing creating connections of objects to outlets by control-dragging onto code

Anything else that would annoy me may be less important bugs or workflows that I have long forgotten about.

Since this all started in a discussion about Gorm... Would I like Gorm [Interface Center?] to be more like Interface Builder of Xcode 3 era? Yes. Not a clone, but more like IB, yes.

Where I'd love Gorm to excel over IB and its integrated variants is in support for editing properties of custom classes in the GUI. If it can do that and if it can non-destructively edit Xcode 3 and Xcode 5 .xibs, this would make it very useful to OS X-only developers as well. Does a class have a @property? Well, then I can see it in a list of attributes of an object in Gorm.

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Ivan