I need somewhere to list my frustrations moving from xcode 3 to what is supposed to be the a move forward. Here is that place. Let me start by saying I don’t even see xcode 4 as an improvement just yet; while they seem to have finally understood people don’t want to manage 10,000 windows while working on a project, they still haven’t understood that one layout doesn’t suit all, and have in my opinion made some very bad design choices.

It has only been a few days though, so I’m willing to give things time to set in. Here are problems that make the current preview quite unusable:

• “Navigate to Counterpart” shortcut combination no longer works (cmd-opt-up).
• Designating shortcut keys gives no feedback if there are multiple assignments of the same key. It just chooses the first in the list and uses it.
• You have to manually open new tabs! This leads me to believe that apple don’t understand how tabs are supposed to work, which baffles me as they usually understand user interface paradigms. Is the xcode team a bit out of touch?
• Trying to bind “New Tab” to cmd-t fails. It seems there is a shortcut hard-wired to this key.
• Project bookmarks are gone. In the migration guide it mentions their presence in the Organizer, but following instructions only gives help document bookmarks, not project bookmarks.
• There is even less feedback while building (used to see “x of x files compiled”, now it’s just a progress bar). This is quite an annoyance for large projects.

• Has problems saving project file to disk.  Should at least give an option to overwrite.

• I can’t seem to find where the colour scheme configurations are stored.  Have yet to take the time to manually recreate my pastels-on-dark theme because of this.
• Auto-completion of overrides no longer works correctly in classes which inherit; it seems to only show overrides from the base (NSObject/NSView) class.  This is a real hit, and actually makes working in the current build of xcode 4 a chore.

Then there are things I think should be added in order to bring xcode into the 21st century, which have still not been addressed:

• There is still no automated handling of IBOutlets in a way that generates code-behind.  Microsoft have mastered this over the years, and while that may be an unfair comparison, MonoTouch also provides this functionality on the iPhone platform via their MonoDevelop IDE!
• There is still no automated/shortcut method of making an instance variable, property, and @synthesize in one go.
• The handling of linking delegates/outlets in the “interface builder” mode is still as painfully ugly as ever.
• Files are still not automatically sorted alphabetically in project navigation pane.  I honestly don’t understand this.
• Light-on-dark anti-aliased text still looks horrible.  Okay, so this is an OS-level problem, but it’s my one biggest gripe so I had to tag it on .

I will be updating this post as I find more issues. If anyone has an obvious solution which I have overlooked to any, please fill me in!

I find it funny that every time I go to post a new blog entry, the wordpress admin site looks different.  They seem to change their design faster than I can post.

Anyway, for those who are as slow as me on the uptake, google recently announced (around 2 weeks ago) exchange protocol support for mail, adding to their existing calendar and contacts push-sync functionality.  I’m not sure if anyone else will be as ecstatic as me on hearing this, but for the benefit of the doubt I thought I should post it here.

If you already have google sync setup for contact/calendar as I did, it is as simple as flicking an iSwitch.  Otherwise, read here for full instructions.

お久しぶりブログに書くこと・・

やっぱりどれだけ「これ書くと良いね!」と 思う内容があっても、時間の問題なんですから・・・ごめんなさい！

では、 今度こそチャットモンチーの話になってしまうんですが

新作DVD「チャットモンチー・レソトラン・ デザート」ということで、ライブの方の映像は割りと少ない代わり、ボーナス映像は長い

まずはライブ映像の感想なんですが、湯気の演奏が2回も入ってて良かったです！湯気ってすごくいい曲なのに、今までライブでの映像を見たことはともかく、Bサイドの曲ですから（僕は未だアルバム以外持ってないので・・）CDクオリティーで聞いたこともないので、感動したんです。

告白の2曲を見て、生で聴いたときの思い出 で胸がいっぱいです。
特に、8cmのピンヒールは感激してしまいます。

でもなんといっても、DVDの一番良いところはボーナスの1人1企画のえっちゃんの代々木公園の路上弾き語りライブなんです。ウルフルズの曲をカバーして2曲続けて歌いました。僕にとって、両方も初めて聞いた曲なのにこんなインパクト感があるって、えっちゃんに限っているでしょう。あんな声はどこまで届けるですかね！

サムライソウル～エイエイオ～

As a little follow-up to my previous post on mastering the art of comparing two text files, I ran into a situation today where i wanted the intersection of two files, rather than the difference between them.  Feeling like a bit of form coding, I added two new options to my app – Intersection and Union comparison modes.

You may notice it looks a bit prettier too .  Behind the scenes, it is also loading files in the background on separate threads, and gives you the ability to abort processing should it take too long.  Hopefully someone will find a use for this.

Download Here (17kb)

I can provide the source code on request (or you can just reflect it for yourself .  Use it as you wish.