I’ve been using the iPhone SDK in Xcode for about two weeks now so I thought it was about time to actually document my thoughts on the tools. I’m a user of TextMate when building web based apps in PHP, which is a great tool and does the job brilliantly for PHP, but I can understand why Apple make you use Xcode. The code completion is great, you can go directly to a function or class description in the API just by double clicking on the name of it while holding alt.

There are a few things I’ve noticed however while developing a few test apps which did surprise me slightly, one such thing is the keyboard for a text field. A user would generally expect this to disappear when ‘Done’ is clicked, or they tap off the keyboard, for some reason Apple didn’t think it right to include that code directly into the text field object, but rather the developer has to create it. There are a few other little quirks in Xcode that I still haven’t figured out yet, however I have only been using it for 2 weeks so I guess in time these will become obvious what they do.

So far I’m pretty impressed with the ease of using Xcode and the Objective-C language to create applications for iPhone OS 3, couple that with Interface Builder and it makes it pretty quick to deliver an application for iPhone OS 3. I have yet to get into Core Data or SQLlite for data storage but I’m always moving forwards.

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