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AppCode: Objective-C IDE from JetBrains goes public

blog.jetbrains.com

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Re: AppCode: Objective-C IDE from JetBrains goes public

#11

Post by extension »

frou_dh wrote: post #7
stevejohnson wrote: post #6

At first I was excited that Xcode had some competition, so I downloaded this as soon as it was available. Unfortunately, it has a crappy Java-generic GUI. For an IDE for a platform that makes a big deal out of user experience, it really looks awful. (And it manages to be slower than Xcode 4!) I understand that tools don't have to be pretty to be functional, but I draw the line here.

Same deal with MonoDevelop. These alien GUIs look absolutely miserable in OS X alongside the system and all the tastefully done third party native apps you have running.

Funny, "alien GUI" is how I was going to describe Xcode.

If the final version of this looks and runs as well as iDEA, it will do just fine, and will hopefully bring OSX/iOS dev back down to earth.

Re: AppCode: Objective-C IDE from JetBrains goes public

#13

Post by spullara »

stevejohnson wrote: post #6

At first I was excited that Xcode had some competition, so I downloaded this as soon as it was available. Unfortunately, it has a crappy Java-generic GUI. For an IDE for a platform that makes a big deal out of user experience, it really looks awful. (And it manages to be slower than Xcode 4!) I understand that tools don't have to be pretty to be functional, but I draw the line here.

In the worst case scenario you should keep it around for refactoring. The support in Xcode is far behind the state-of-the-art, those features alone should pay to have this around.

Re: AppCode: Objective-C IDE from JetBrains goes public

#14

Post by _frog »

extension wrote: post #11
frou_dh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same deal with MonoDevelop. These alien GUIs look absolutely miserable in OS X alongside the system and all the tastefully done third party native apps you have running.

Funny, "alien GUI" is how I was going to describe Xcode. If the final version of this looks and runs as well as iDEA, it will do just fine, and will hopefully bring OSX/iOS dev back down to earth.

I can't say I share your dissatisfaction wot the new XCode UI, initially I disliked it but now I have no idea how I ever lived without it.

Just give it a chance is all I'm saying.

Re: AppCode: Objective-C IDE from JetBrains goes public

#17

Post by i386 »

stevejohnson wrote: post #6

At first I was excited that Xcode had some competition, so I downloaded this as soon as it was available. Unfortunately, it has a crappy Java-generic GUI. For an IDE for a platform that makes a big deal out of user experience, it really looks awful. (And it manages to be slower than Xcode 4!) I understand that tools don't have to be pretty to be functional, but I draw the line here.

I have a few disagreements with what you have said here.

AppCode is in Beta - it's going to be slow and its going to crash. Even though you have stated that "tools don't have to be pretty to be functional" I think you have contradicted your point here by writing off AppCode on that basis entirely.

As a software developer, fair criticism of a tool should never rely on its aesthetics but rather on its ability to solve problems and solve them productivity. Eclipse, Emacs, Hudson, et al are tools I wouldn't say are aesthetically pleasing but they are very successful at solving the problems they were designed to solve. Thus I believe aesthetics should logically be placed secondary to utility.

Re: AppCode: Objective-C IDE from JetBrains goes public

#19

Post by jasonlotito »

callumjones wrote: post #15

I'm excited to see more additional development solutions for Objective C; but why are we taking a step backward with these awful Java like GUIs that have plagued Eclipse and NetBeans? Why in 2011, are people still building UI heavy applications with Java?

First, JetBrain IDEs that I've used are lightyears ahead of Eclipse and Netbeans in terms of performance. Secondly, they have a lot of established code written in Java. Thirdly, their other IDEs are cross platform.

I'll wait and see how this turns out, but their other offerings are excellent.

Re: AppCode: Objective-C IDE from JetBrains goes public

#20

Post by msbarnett »

spullara wrote: post #13
stevejohnson wrote: post #6

At first I was excited that Xcode had some competition, so I downloaded this as soon as it was available. Unfortunately, it has a crappy Java-generic GUI. For an IDE for a platform that makes a big deal out of user experience, it really looks awful. (And it manages to be slower than Xcode 4!) I understand that tools don't have to be pretty to be functional, but I draw the line here.

In the worst case scenario you should keep it around for refactoring. The support in Xcode is far behind the state-of-the-art, those features alone should pay to have this around.

> The support in Xcode is far behind the state-of-the-art, those features alone should pay to have this around.

Assuming AppCode's refactoring support ends up being even as good as Xcode 3's hit-or-miss heuristics, which remains to be seen.

"AppCode is from JetBrains and ReSharper/IntelliJ IDEA have great refactoring, so AppCode will too" isn't a valid line of reasoning, because the limiting factor here isn't the author of the tool, it's how much a priori reasoning you can actually do about the target language in question. C# and Java are both, by design, highly amenable to the kinds of static analysis that make refactoring support simple. Objective-C, by design, is not.

Xcode 3 and below did a lot of pattern matching to try to make a decent go of autocompletion and refactoring, and it fell down a lot of the time. With Xcode 4, Apple has turned the new compiler, LLVM, into a shared library and hooked into it for refactoring and autocompletion, so they're working with the same parse trees the compiler is, and they have as much information to reason with at compile time as can be hoped for in an extremely late binding, weakly typed language like Objective-C.

How is AppCode going to get any better than that? Either they're going to go the heuristics route, like Xcode 3 and below, and have all kinds of cases where they fail miserably, or they're going to hook into LLVM, and have no real insights into the code that Xcode 4 wouldn't.

In short, I'm extremely skeptical of the claim that AppCode is going to be leaps and bounds better at statically analyzing Objective-C than Xcode 4, given the constraints of the target language.

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