For those of you who missed the news, Apple has finally released the all new Xcode 4, which it first previewed at WWDC 2010 last June. Xcode 4 is a major new version of Apple’s development IDE, and in fact the most significant update since version 1, from what understand (i personally started with Xcode 2.5, n00b that i am).
There’s a lot of great and exciting new features in Xcode 4 and – while i personally was a big fan of Xcode 3.x as well – i think many developers coming from a Visual Studio or Delphi background will be a lot more comfortable with Xcode 4 than they might have been with Xcode 3 or older.
So what about support from our products? Well, the good news is that Xcode and the underlying OS SDKs are a lot more separated than IDE and framework are on other platforms, so our libraries, written for Mac OS X 10.5/10.6 and iOS 3.x/4.x pretty much just work, since Xcode 4 is “just” a new IDE. There’s really only one area that needs attention, and that’s the new project templates, which i’ve already been busy working on (Xcode 4’s new template system is very different, but also very powerful, allowing us to create much cooper project templates that we had for Xcode 3, with less redundancy) and should be shipping with the upcoming “Spring 2011” release at the end of the month. (In the mean time, it’s worth mentioning that Xcode 3 and Xcode 4 use the same project file format – so you can just create a new project in Xcode 3 and then load that into Xcode 4, assuming you have them both installed side by side.
Oh, it’s also worth mentioning that while Xcode 4 is a free download if you’re a member of the $99 Mac Developer Program, it’s also available for the low price of $4.99 from the Mac App Store, for those who are not. That’s pretty cool. Oh,and @pilky has a ‘super mega awesome review‘ of Xcode 4 up on his site that’s well worth the read!
