Well, I did it. I’m back using XCode. (See the previous post for the reasons.) After a full year off, I felt the itch and wanted to update my writing app, Auteureist. Here’s what I discovered.

• XCode is still a mess of Swiss-army knife of a tool. It still has too many features and functions and tries to make everyone happy at the cost of ease of use and clarity. It’s still a megalith of an app.
• XCode is still a sloth when it comes to pairing and synchronizing iOS device cache on startup. But it seems better.
• It was refreshing to ignore all of the somewhat-weekly tool and language updates for an entire year. I didn’t feel like I was playing catch up with Apple on a weekly basis. By ignore the beta release cycle, I was able to concentrate on functionality and not trying to hit a moving target.
• Swift and SwiftUI across platforms seems better, but is still not a unified API. Still to many conditional imports and code. It’s kludgey.
• The language design problems in Swift/SwiftUI still persist. I’m not surprised. Apple has invested a lot in creating them, but again, Apple is trying to please everyone at the cost of language simplicity and clarity. Macros, conditional compilations, etc. abound.
• XCode and the development process seem snappier. I guess faster chips help. But would we really need them if the language and dev tools were more streamlined/efficient?
• Downloading tools is a bit faster, but still painfully slow. This is the price one pays for a megalith of an app.

So, what have I learned from my hiatus from Apple programming? I can currently work with it if:

• I focus on Mac development and defer iOS. This bypasses the caching and API madness.
• I focus on programming what I want/need and ignore the Apple beta release cycles. This brings personal sanity. It’s OK to not use new features right away. They’ll still (mostly) be there when and if I need them.

So, what have I been using it for? I’ve been working on v5 of my writing app, Auteureist. I’d decided it was time to update the last version I’d been using which was over two years old. So, I’ve completely rewritten it. For the most part, all of the functionality I need and use has been implemented. There are still a ton of rough edges and minor functions I need to rebuild. The UI has been completely redone. It’s still not something I can use on a daily basis, but it’s getting close. I’m still tweaking the UI, and cleaning up bugs and some functionality.

Will I ever release this? Most of the versions haven’t been released to the app store. I don’t want into supporting and dealing with other people’s requests and problems. This app is highly-opinionated and designed to work around how I like to work.

Here are some screenshots:

- The main editor view with all main UI interfaces displayed. The colors are theme-able.

- Progress display inspector.

- Early metadata editor (one of many). The forms are dynamically generated at runtime from YML files.

- The main editor view with all of the optional UI hidden.

- The About view.

There's a lot I'm not showing. 

That's enough for now.