A peek at Xcode 3.0

I have been using Xcode 3.0 for some time now. It has worked quite well in production for me. Full of features and enhancements make it one of the best development environments to work with. One of the features which particularly strikes me as genius is the Project Organizer. This feature is available from the Window menu.

Not only does the organizer allow the developer to maintain a number of Xcode projects in an effectively organized way, but it also allows for building Makefile projects. This is in fact something new from Apple and is extremely convenient. Open source projects fit favorably in the little window which is brilliant to say the least.

But let’s take it one step further, not only is the Organizer an organizer, but it is also a lightweight SCM system. Sure it is a local, file based SCM system, but it is extremely useful.

This lightweight SCM functionality is by no means a replacement for the SCM system one uses. It is extremely light weight and allows for better organizing changes made on the local machine. This is quite beneficial for my needs as I often work on code involving a large number of changes which I perform incrementally. Once I reach a stable or satisfactory state of the development task, I simply create a snapshot. The reason I do so is because quite often it is not desired to check in one’s partial changes to the main code repository used by your project team, as it may inflict unnecessary, yet inadvertent, pain on them. This feature allows the developer to experiment effectively while maintaining a coherent and easily accessible history of changes. I often code in a location where there is no internet access and I am unable to check in my desired changes for example. During those times, I can simply create a snapshot and restore later when I am ready to perform the check in to the public code tree.

Let’s move on… so I began coding and I created a snapshot before hand. I made some changes and decided to Create another snapshot. Let’s see what this looks like…

As you can see, the file differences in the “Files Changed” list are displayed and right below that is the differences results, provided by Xcode’s built-in diff tool. Yes, it does look very similar to filemerge. The toolbar provides few operations but gives the user the ability to create more snapshots, delete snapshots and of course restore your project state to a particular snapshot.

Finally, the Organizer also possesses an editor, thus allowing the developer to perform all of his/her work from inside the Organizer.