Once upon a time, a long while ago, I was a programmer… Coding was once my favourite pastime and was something I spent most of my time doing, then promotions came along and gradually took me away from the thing I enjoyed doing most and into IT management. As I say that was a long time ago, and over recent years I have found myself wanting to renew my passion and have a play around with the latest development tools.
Since owning a Mac I have been meaning to have a look at Xcode, and this week finally got around to loading Xcode 3 onto my Leopard based iMac. Installing Xcode is straightfoward, either download it from Apple ( you need to join the Apple Developer Connection at http://developer.apple.com first, but this is free ) or install it from your original OS X install DVD. I decided to have a go at loading Xcode 3 although I could also have downloaded and installed Xcode 2.5. Once installed launching Xcode takes you through a very simple setup after which you are greeted with a Welcome to Xcode window that contains links to Getting Started Guides, Documentation, Mailing Lists and more.
One of the options presented is a Quick Tour of Xcode which looked like a suitable place to start. Clicking this link launches another window, the Xcode Documentation browser, and places you at the start of the Quick Tour. This guide is supposed to take you through creating your first application using Xcode, in this case a classic Hello app. Unfortunately there is a bit of a catch with the guide. It is written for Xcode 2 ! After creating the initial project successfully the guide takes you to the step where you use Interface Builder to modify the interface of the application. Unfortunately the steps it advises are simply not possible in XCode 3 as the option to click on Classes in the mainmenu.nib window are not there !
This is pretty poor and is certainly not a good way of introducing new developers to OS X software development. I dont know if there is a solution to this ( updated XCode documentation for example ), but if there isn’t I really think Apple should address this in the next update to Xcode.
For my part I was interested enough to work around this and have since found a couple of guides and video tutorials that take you through building simple apps in XCode 3, but come on Apple this needs sorting.
XCode 3 Beep Tutorial – Building a simple application in Xcode 3
Could not agree more. I love the Apple stuff, but this is a major put-off. I also started with enthousiasm to look into Xcode, but the tuturials are useless, worse, misleading. Cannot believe that a professional developer took can be released in such a state. Could you perhaps post a few links for those tutorials you found that do work?
The worst culprit seems to be interface builder. I wanted to learn XCode in order to pursue an idea for an app I had, but just found myself being stymied by the lack of agreement between the instructions and the program. There also seems to be a certain amount of counter-intuitiveness when it comes to linking up controllers and the like. While not deterred, I am definitely stymied for the mo.
Yes your right Adam. I really think this is very unlike Apple who usually take such care of the small details.
BTW, you are my first comment since installing reCAPTCHA on my comments ! Thanks
Just found the same thing, after frustratingly thinking it was me being stupid. Not like Apple at all.
Same problem here! It's nice to know I'm not the only one, though.
can some post the links of tutorials for xcode 3.0.