Xcode

Web extensions no longer populate under the safari extension pane. If I’m lucky enough to ever see that happen there’s a bug where every file shows as “unable to find”. This has been going on for months.

It crashes too often for me.

Xcode is, by far, the slowest IDE I’ve ever used. Even on a M3 MacBook Pro it is ridiculously slow. It takes a few seconds to recognize that I’m typing. The app preview crashes often. Plus, the autocomplete code suggestions are wrong and will put things in your code that don’t build. It lacks simple features, like giving information about a method or property when hovering over it. I’m wanting to learn Swift for a simple little project, but I’m finding Xcode so frustrating to work with that I’m considering building my app in something like React Native.

The iOS simulator is fantastic when it works. But man upgrading this stuff just breaks everything. Xcode is super irritating and disorganized in where places are installed and accessible.

genuinely think it’s a scam. here I am, the very weird dude at the coffee shop who approaches you when you’re clearly in your phone, to tell you about it: At some point, Apple realized they could slow the development of all competing products by simply provisioning, with first-class accessibility & visibility, something which would be ignorantly presumed to benefit from vertical integration. it’s an absurd hog of memory and CPU. It is extremely slow to perform extremely simple tasks. There is no doubt that this thing is running extraordinarily inefficient algorithms on extraordinarily bloated & numerous subjects. you actually just can’t use it for a moderately complex project unless you’ve got an M1+ and even then you’re going to be dreading your work unless you are strategically working against it’s own habits. Nothing can or will be done without extensive pigeon-holing to ensure your previews are encapsulated enough to be updated in reasonable time. I think there is other evidence that it is an attempt at sabotage - xibs, storyboards, schemes and targets. The confusion of natural ideation with the actual mechanics of putting text onto a page, or with putting text onto a page with the creation of views, or of settings for building with settings for how a build will be used - in a manner that is so oddly antagonistic that you’ll wonder what genius designed such an opponent. it’s rly something. I recall as an undergrad texting a friend “this is great!!!” about Eclipse in 2013. I was just about to discover RStudio, Emacs, and VSCode. I was about to become a programmer who understood how valuable IDEs could be. I did not even know how good I had it. Somehow, in 2025, I’ll be using a tool which is vastly inferior to most open-source tools produced by the most valuable company in the world.

When Cupertino ditched Motorola, then Intel, they also ditched the engineers working on Xcode because it was making the OS too Linux like, making desirable user intervention of their purchased systems a play toy and nothing else.

I cannot sort my project by type

It's slow, obtuse, and possessing one of the least intuitive and most argumentatively-opinionated UI's of any Apple product. It doesn't help that it's prone to building 50 GB cache files and emulator images without ever bothering to mention same. If you can get away with the CLI tools, do that.

Can't install on anything other than a mac. Can't install without going through the Apple app store. Really wish you could do iOS development without it!

TLDR; Xcode needs a redesign, but it's still awesome either way. Xcode is amazing. From the day Steve Jobs announced it, when the iPhone SDK came out, and to now. It's great. But being a *very* old app, it does have it's flaws. And since I use it so much everyday, here's what's wrong: The interface. Xcode's UX has stayed the same for so long, and it desperately needs a rewrite. The preview section looks brand new (because it is,) while the navigator looks like it came out in 2003 (Because it did.) I can tell that most of Xcode is made in AppKit, and some of it is in SwiftUI. Xcode's story is the Mac's story. Mac OS X (Technically still the name) is a Frankenstein of the Darwin project, XNU, BSD, UNIX, and NEXTStep. Xcode is a Frankenstein of *tons* of different interfaces. Cocoa, SwiftUI, AppKit, knowing Apple they probably put some random UIKit port specific to Xcode in there. The point is, Xcode needs to be rewritten, just like Mac OS was.