Apple/iPhone Development IDE Preferences?

Question

I'm going to do something I never thought I'd do... learn how to program for Apple hardware . After working in C, C++, C#, .NET, and even in the golden days of DOS (a little DOS4G/W memory extender in Borland Turbo-C, anyone?) and even as a kid, playing around with Atari 8-Bit Turbo-BASIC, I feel a little traitorous on multiple levels :) Anyway, I'm going to grad school, studying music full-time - it'll be the first time in years I won't have a full-time programming gig - and I thought it would be fun to pick-up some Objective-C in my free-time - and maybe a little extra pocket change (one can always hope :)

So, to the point of the post. I'm very used to Visual Studio, the designer, the XAML editor, the code-behind, blah blah blah. A friend pulled up X-Code on his little MacBook to show off how cool it's supposed to be. Sure, it has the same sorts of things as VS overall, but it seemed a little more scattered then I'd like. I'm sure once I got used to it, it would be fine, but I was just wondering if there are other good, free (or almost free)/or open-source editors out there for the Intel-based Apples that could also handle iPhone development. Or any tips on getting into xCode? I've just decided to do this, so I feel like I'm starting from scratch. I'm not slamming X-Code... I haven't really used it yet. I was just wondering what coders' preferences are.

Thanks for any advice!

Answer 1

I think XCode is the most popular choice amongst Cocoa developers. I think the best thing you could do is go straight into writing apps and exploring.

http://cocoadevcentral.com/ - Has some great tutorials, they're also usually very screenshot friendly.

Answer 2

For pure ease XCode will be the way to go since it integrates with the iPhone simulator and Interface Builder. Also, when you want to deploy your app to an actual device XCode does the certificate installation and management. I don't have experience with any other IDE's for OSX though so I can't 100% answer your question. But, these are things you'll want to be aware of during your investigation.

Let us know what you find!

Answer 3

There really is no alternative IDE on OS X for writing native applications. Some dislike the Xcode built-in editor, however. One very popular alternative is TextMate (non-free, but well worth the ~$50). Xcode can be configured to use your editor of choice for editing text files. Free alternatives include Emacs and Vim ports for OS X.

You can, of course, use the gcc toolchain without Xcode (e.g. using one of the Unix-style build systems such as Make). You can also use xcodebuild at the terminal command line to build an Xcode project without using the Xcode GUI at all (you'd be hard-pressed to configure and manage the project without the GUI, however). Combining these two, one could cobble together an IDE from e.g Eclipse to build an OS X app. iPhone would be harder since Xcode handles certificate signing etc. for you, but still possible. You would loose all of the nice Objective-C completion and documentation integration you get from Xcode, of course.

So, in summary, Xcode is pretty much the only game in town. It will undoubtedly take a while to get used to coming from VS. In particular, code generation is almost unheard of in the Cocoa world. When you feel yourself searching for those kind of tools, train yourself to try a different approach. Objective-C's late-binding combined with the power of NIB/XIB (bundles produced in Interface Builder that describe the UI of an app; XIB is a newer, version-control-friendly XML-based format that is automatically compiled into a NIB, the old-style format from NextStep days) makes code generation unnecessary.

For non-Cocoa/iPhone development, the ecosystem is naturally larger. Nokia has their own IDE for the Qt toolkit which can be used to write OS X (but not iPhone) apps. Eclipse can be used to write Java apps using any of the Java toolkits (including SWT and the Qt-Java framework, QtJambi).

For pure Windows-developer familiarity, there's also Mono which runs on OS X. MonoDevelop may run on OS X, but I'm not sure.