King of the Xcode

From: Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch
  To: xcode-set

Dear Xcode team,

Due to an amazing Human Resources fluke, somehow I’ve been temporarily assigned as manager of Xcode Developer Tools. This is all the more impressive as I’m not even an Apple employee. HR assures me that this will all be cleared up in a couple of days.

In the meantime, you can relax because I don’t have any grand ambitions about turning the products upside-down (well, OK, I do, but two days isn’t enough).

Instead, we’re just going to do a bunch of tweaks that, while minor, together add up to a much better experience.:

• ZeroLink off by default. Great idea. Cool technology. Helped our speed credibility in the face of CodeWarrior. But it’s a pain. How many times has a developer accidently giving a ZeroLink-broken-binary to a user? How many times has he crashed at runtime when the link error could have been detected at link-time?

  Once a project grows, it makes sense to turn on ZeroLink for the Debug target. But having it on by default for new projects doesn’t make sense. New projects are small, and ZeroLink doesn’t appreciably speed up the development cycle. It only adds headaches to small projects.

• NSZombieEnabled=YES set by default. It’s nuts this isn’t enabled by default on new Foundation/Cocoa projects. It’s such a simple change and flags such an insidious error, I bet this is a single easiest, highest-payoff change we can make.

• Default breakpoint on -[NSException raise]. New Foundation/Cocoa projects should have this breakpoint set by default. Often exceptions will go unnoticed during development. This helps them stand out.

• Easy Unit Testing. It’s a bear to turn on unit testing for Cocoa apps+frameworks. Let’s either make it part of the standard project templates or write an AppleScript which automates the complicated chore.

• Kill Java Support. Let’s just End the Charade. We’re well behind Eclipse and IntelliJ and we’ll never catch up. Hell, we’re behind raw ant+TextMate. Let’s call up JetBrains and try to get them to offer a beefy discount to ADC Select+Premier developers in return for us sending them over.

As you can see, these are low-hanging fruit. Probably the hardest is making unit testing easier to use, but that task is more time-consuming than hard.

So, not a boat-load of work, but still high-value. I suspect you’ll finish far ahead of Apple security walking me out the door. When you do, meet me over at Coffee Society and I’ll buy everyone a round.

Wednesday, May 31, 2006
01:35 AM