Oh, that's disappointing. I was wondering if anyone made a decent competitor to XCode after dipping my toes into some iOS development, and it looks like it's just being killed as I'm learning about it.
I’d recommend just using Xcode, if you really want you can use any editor and the command line tools to build. That said despite being a bloated behemoth Xcode has a lot of very helpful tools built in and it being the default for all iOS devs means a lot of tutorials and docs are going to assume usage.
Additionally, a lot of the most common types of “grumpiness” encountered with Xcode can be avoided by avoiding code smells when writing Swift — SourceKit (which powers Xcode’s syntax highlighting, autocomplete, etc) doesn’t like it if you deeply nest closures, get a little too crazy with chaining optionals, etc.
Oh, and if at all possible avoid XIBs and storyboards and write your UI in pure code. Interface Builder was once a thing of beauty back when it was its own app, but it’s been a slow quirky mess ever since it got merged into Xcode. Code only UIs are a bit more verbose but it’s not too bad with Swift+UIKit and it’s so much less trouble, especially when you consider how much more git friendly code is than machine generated XML (merge conflicts with storyboards are nightmarish).
Doing this, I encounter little trouble with Xcode using it day in and day out. As a whole it’s smoother than my typical session in Android Studio.
mrbombastic|3 years ago
kitsunesoba|3 years ago
Oh, and if at all possible avoid XIBs and storyboards and write your UI in pure code. Interface Builder was once a thing of beauty back when it was its own app, but it’s been a slow quirky mess ever since it got merged into Xcode. Code only UIs are a bit more verbose but it’s not too bad with Swift+UIKit and it’s so much less trouble, especially when you consider how much more git friendly code is than machine generated XML (merge conflicts with storyboards are nightmarish).
Doing this, I encounter little trouble with Xcode using it day in and day out. As a whole it’s smoother than my typical session in Android Studio.