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XCode Roundup
Durin_Deathless writes "XCode 1.5 is now available to the general public through ADC. Highlights include dead code stripping, remote debugging, Subversion support, and improved editor speed. There's also a new GCC, which is supposed to compile faster, and lots of AppleScript changes. Also, code completion now works in Java and AppleScript."
djabbour writes "Blizzard Entertainment develops its games simultaneously on the Windows and Mac OS X platforms. This article claims Xcode Tools 'play [a] critical role.'"
djabbour writes "Blizzard Entertainment develops its games simultaneously on the Windows and Linux platforms."
While the Slashdot community may have largely embraced the Mac platform since the release of the BSD/Mach based OS X, Mac != Linux.
Blizzard has had strong support for the Mac platform since its beginning; and it's nice to see that the Mac forms an integral part of their development process.
Live simply, that others may simply live. -Gandhi
GW-Basic...
Err, that's Windows and Mac OS X platforms, not windows and linux, yesh.
My email addy? should be easy enough.
I always though that slashdot was fairly quick with it's links to the latest news/releases. But Xcode 1.5 was released days ago and that Blizzard story is over a week old!
Please point me to the Linux version of StarCraft. Oh wait, damn editors are messing with my head.
Anyways, is this GCC 3.5 or not?
- Sherman
The article mentions the various tools that come with Xcode, but not Xcode itself. Reading between the lines, I guess Blizzard is probably still using CodeWarrior for actual compilation work.
http://www.themeparks.ie
i've tried 5 times now and cannot seem to start the download ... .torrent? - and b4 some1 calls it piracy ... it is freely available and since you pretty much need to pay $$$ apple to run it (osx/mac) what would be the diff?
any1 have a
Though this piece of news is a bit old, it's still noteworthy. Xcode, IMHO, is amazing and fun to use. Version 1.2 was too buggy, but I've found 1.5 to be a great improvement. I'm sure version 1.5.1 is on its way soon, if you read the Release Notes carefully enough, Apple admits to releasing 1.5 with 10 to 12 bugs, in semi-basic feature areas, most of which cause Xcode to crash.
There are other IDE's available for other platforms, and though Xcode is one of the only ones for the Mac aside from CodeWarrior, I'd still give kudos to it, and Apple for making it.
They seem to be really paying attention to what developers need. They're greatly improved their documentation in the past year, and Xcode is pretty darn developer friendly, now supporting Subversion.
As much as I love Apple, I'm a disappointed by this Blizzard article. I preface all this by saying that I've been Mac OS dev for several years now and love Apple's OS quality ethic to the marrow. However, I also co-develop my source base under Win32 all these years under, of course CodeWarrior. So, to be clear, I've been developing cross-platform cores for both platforms under CodeWarrior for years now (using the Mac OS IDE--I'd rather quit software than use an IDE in the Windows environment with Windows "standards"). It's only been in this last year that Xcode itself (ie, not tools, such as CHUD) is finally about to pass CodeWarrior overall.
I'm disappointed with this article because it's basically just rah-rah-rah (as in cheerleading) and speaks little to a small company cross platform dev (like me). In other words, it's great that company the size of Blizzard has enough devs to have Windows teams, Mac OS team, and cross-platform teams (such that each team uses a native IDE and compiler) but smaller companies don't have that kind of firepower. In other words, as a dev who targets Win32 and Mac OS, I don't have the time to use Xcode for Mac OS and VisualStudio for Win32. Because it's meant to be PR, I won't harp on how the article doesn't contain a shed of detail (like one poster here commented, they say they use the Xcode tools, not Xcode itself).
On that note, CodeWarrior still is impressive across the board for *both* Win32 and Mac OS projects. The time and effort they've put into the size and flexibility of the various pref panes and project item control has paid off; it's provided unmatched project control and continues to reign superior (disclaimer: I've yet to give Xcode 1.5 a close look).
My biggest reason for not jumping to Xcode (from CodeWarrior) is that I'd still have to build my projects for Win32 under CodeWarrior after switching to Xcode. Bottom line is that now I'd be juggling two project sets with no significant gain from the switch to Xcode. My decision to switch to Xcode will be based on two factors: what Xcode 2 brings to the table and if Metrowerks releases an entirely new version of CodeWarrior (ie, CW Pro 10). If the latter does not happen by the time Xcode 2 is released (mid 2005?), CodeWarrior's Mac OS support will simply be just too out of date to run with.
G-Force music visualization
First, a disclaimer. I use OS X at home, Linux and Windows at work, and I write almost everything in Java.
Basically, I don't like using Visual Studio, because I can't use it at home. I don't like using X-Code because I can't use it at work. I write in Java because it will run at home, at work, and everywhere in between, and I write my Java with Netbeans. This prevents me from needing to do thing entirely differently in several places, and is really convenient. I also find Netbeans to be better than Eclipse (YMMV), but that's another story.
I wish Apple would just fold their work into Eclipse and Netbeans so we don't have n+1 coding tools each with its own quirks. Either contribute actual fixes to the programs, or just release a bunch of plugins that allow apple script development, etc....
That being said, I can't really complain too much. Free is free afterall, but I just wish they improved one of the other free (and cross platform) IDEs, rather than reinventing the wheel yet again.
For a true cross-platform build system, take a look at Scons, Subversion and Data Debugger - I've used all of those on Windows (except DDD), Mac, Linux and FreeBSD - and they're fantastic.
When I tried using XCode, I found it seriously unfriendly - the UI is bizzare and makes no logical sense. I ended up trying to use XCode simply for editing code, before getting frustrated and using Emacs to edit and the command line to build.
"Xcode Tools" is Apple's official name for the entire suite of developer tools, while "Xcode" is just the name of the IDE. Given that this is an official Apple PR article, I don't find it surprising that they conform to this naming protocol.
(On a side note, this has caused confusion in the past. For one update (I believe it was 1.2), there was the Xcode 1.2 Update Available automatically through Software Update, which only updated the IDE. There was the separate Xcode Tools 1.2 download (not available automatically) that contained more updates for the entire suite. The product manager thus discovered that no one downloads ReadMe files for products before downloading the product itself.)
I personally know of several software engineers at Blizzard and the developer tool of choice is and has been CodeWarrior for the development of games like the Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft series. This story reaks of a marketing department partnership trying to generate news for both camps but the legitimacy of the claims on any significant level is questionable at best.
We don't think we are missing out on much at all. I'm sorry but it is not at all likely that there will ever be a MAC version of Rhino. We do our software development in Microsoft Developer Studio. There is no MAC based equivalent for this product and it's resources. This is the first problem. Secondly, it is nearly impossible to find MAC programmers with the PhD level math skills needed for this kind of programming at any price. Thirdly, there are not enough potential sales of a MAC based product to keep it affordable. At present projections, assuming we could find the programmers and they could co-develop a product similar enough to the Windows based product to make it viable, each copy would have to be priced over $20,000 per seat. At that price, a $1,000 Windows computer running Windows based Rhino makes a lot more sense. Don't you think?
Reply to Point #1
Xcode and Codewarrior
Reply to point #2
Need I mention products like Mathworks [Matlab] and Wolfram [Mathematica] ?
Our department, the Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering department graduates several PhDs specializing in surfacing math, several of whom I have worked with. They eventually get hired into the automotive and marine industries. Several of them now work for companies like Dassault [Catia], EAI (now Unigraphics), Imageware Surfacer (now Unigraphics) all doing work on CAD and advanced surfacing, based on their PhD work. PhD's with programming knowledge are platform agnostic. Equations and algorithms that work on a Windows PC can be ported to a Mac, or any other platform for that matter.
I don't believe that any programmer can't pick up a Mac OSX development environment, especially when academic institutions teach on platform neutral environments. C, C++, OpenGL, Java, ...etc.
Reply to point #3
Apparently, companies like Alias [Maya], NewTek [Lightwave], Microsoft [Office], Mathworks [Matlab], Adobe....don't concur with your hypothesis. Nor do they charge 20 time more per seat for their Mac OSX ports.
The $20,000 per seat cost using the percentage of total sales of PC vs Macs is clearly a red herring. A much better example would be the fact that Alias' sales of Maya make up over %25 of their total revenue stream, even though Macs sales are less than 5% of total computer sales. The reason for Maya's success on Mac OSX, as well as other similar software, is because Macs are used in the computer graphics, video, scientific and engineering community. Applications that cater to 3D modeling, 2D imaging, video are used to a greater proportion on Macs than that found in the Windows community. Hence, sales of the Mac OSX Rhino 3D port would not be 19 to 1 (Windows vs Macs), a more realistic ratio would be 3 to 1 ( Windows vs Macs, based on the Alias Maya example).
The question is would McNeel & Associates want to keep trying to growing in just a PC market, or experience the potential of increasing sales (as Alias did when they made their Mac OSX port) another 30% - 25% ?
It does work. It's pointing to a directory. You click on it, and Safari grabs it, and mounts the directory in the finder.
If you go and look at your finder after you've tried this half a dozen times, you probably have half a dozen copies of this directory mounted in the finder. Just grab the files inside and drag them to whereever you want them.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.