Ask HN: Why do you use AppCode for iOS development?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6849375

by alexgaribay • 13 years ago

5 3 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What do you find better/worse than developing in Xcode?

nwalter08• 13 years ago

I would love to hear any responses to this.

rpwilcox• 13 years ago

I've been using Appcode exclusively for the last week, working in a greenfield app.

Up until now I've used Appcode here and there for things, but this is the first time I've used it for, well, a work-week straight.

I've used many versions of Xcode (and I date back from the Project Builder era, so I have those experiences too). But I haven't used XCode 5 much.

AppCode is nice in that it's full of handy suggestions. "Do you want to create an @class for this class name you typed in a header file that I don't know about yet?". "Do you want to import a header for this class in this .m file?", that kind of thing. Which I find is very helpful.

Appcode also has some really good refactoring tools, but I think Xcode 5 has some of those tools now itself. I've been using Appcode's Extract Method refactoring tool every day or so as I need.

There are a few things that get me - in particular new behaviors in Appcode 2.5.3 around semicolon/brace stuff that I haven't figured out how Appcode is trying to help me yet. But I've not written much code today.

Appcode is annoying that you need both XCode and Appcode up most of the time, because you'll need to make a change in a storyboard or something. (Greenfield app, storyboards are fine for now). I look forward to the new view builder, and am just waiting the day it can edit storyboards.

The debugger in Appcode feels subpar, compared to the debugger in Xcode, but that might be how I use it. I tend to evaluate a lot of expressions in LLDB and Appcode seems to have an autocomplete bug. But there does seem to be power if you dig into Appcode's debugging - evaluating code I select in the editor, which I've seen but only used once.

The other bad thing about Appcode is that it's pretty bloated. I don't want/need HTML things in my Objective-C editor. And frack me if I can find where a specific keybinding or preference setting is.

But, after using Appcode full time for a week I probably won't go back to Xcode 5. Appcode helps me write better quality code faster and takes care of the dumb housekeeping ("I know I need to import the header file for this class I'm using, but I'm working on something here" doesn't happen: I see an Appcode warning, hit option-return, it gets automatically added for me without me breaking stride).

alexgaribay• 13 years ago

The other bad thing about Appcode is that it's pretty bloated. I don't want/need HTML things in my Objective-C editor

You can disable the unwanted plugins (i.e. html/xml/js/source control) so the memory consumption is less. This feature is available to Intellij and to AppCode.

And thanks for your comment. It sounds to me like AppCode is worth it to you.

Ask HN: Why do you use AppCode for iOS development?

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