As is well documented on Twitter, I’ve had my share of frustrating system locking beachball of death experiences with Xcode, so it should come as no surprise that I’ve been keeping a keen eye on JetBrains’ AppCode IDE for iOS and MacOS development.
Being a user of two of JetBrains’ other IDEs, Android Studio and RubyMine, I found the on-boarding experience for AppCode to be pretty familar and was able to get up and running in just a few minutes. Overall, the keyboard shortcuts are very similar to their other IDEs and there’s a lot of value in having a similar setup on multiple IDEs.
AppCode also includes many of the refactoring tools that you’ll be familar with if you use any of JetBrains’ other IDEs and has impressilvely just about been able to keep up with Swift 2.0. However, it’s pretty clear that the AppCode team’s fighting an uphill battle to keep up with the development of Swift and is still refining how the refactoring tools deal with the langauge — the AppCode team will likely have to devote continued effort to keeping up with Swift for the forseable future.
Unfortunately, keeping up with Apple’s development of Swift seems ot have come at a cost, the integrated UI designer. As explained here, the Designer has been made a plugin that can be added after you install the main AppCode package. It’s also worth noting that the plugin doesn’t work on all interface file types and was not useable at all for three out of the four test iOS projects that I used to evaluate the Designer. On the one project that it did work with, it was pretty disappointing and not at all an acceptable replacement for the tooling provided in Xcode for user interface design.
What I and I imagine the vast majority of iOS and MacOS developers want out of AppCode is for it to be what it originally was planned to be — a full Xcode replacement, but there’s a lot of ground to cover before it can qualify there. If JetBrains is serious about AppCode, then they’re going to need to improve the user interface designer to the point where 100% of an iOS or MacOS development project can be done in AppCode. Let me know what you think on Twitter.
