Xcode 4.6 was released on January 28th, the same day that iOS 6.1 was released. It adds support for iOS 6.1 and Mac OS X 10.8, and two new devices, the iPad mini and the 4th-gen iPad with Retina display. There are also a number of improvements to the LLVM compiler and Objective-C language, including some new warnings to help find subtle bugs when using ARC and weak references.
The improvement that jumped out at me is a simple one, but one that is already saving me a lot of frustration. It used to happen when typing in the class name NSString. This problem is best explained by this classic pic from the Tumblr called Texts from Xcode:
I don’t know about you, but I use NSString waaaay more than NSStream.
With Xcode 4.6, as I started typing in NSString, here’s what happened:
Autocomplete, mirabile dictu, jumped straight for NSString!
Sometimes, it’s the little things that make the experience.
3 replies on “My Favourite Xcode Improvement”
Your blog article was features on the Code Project daily emailer (The Code Project Insider, Daily Developer News). Kudos!
I found it from CodeProject too!
What makes me really cross about Xcode is that *so many* names start with NS….. it’s pretty meningless, why don’t they alias the names and give us all simpler typing and easier intellisense?
@chris f: it’s from Steve Jobs’ NextStep. And because it’s from Apple. You must live with it. No complaint works. I found it’s really annoying when you must start *almost* everything with NS: String, Int, Bool…