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AppCode: Objective-C IDE from JetBrains goes public

71 points by oemera 16y ago

meinhimmel 16y ago
I am very excited to try this since XCode has really needed a suitable alternative for a while.
mrbrandonking 16y ago
I've wished many times for ReSharper-like refactoring in Xcode. Now JetBrains (the ReSharper people) have announced CIDR, an Objective-C IDE. Apparently CIDR is still at an early stage (pre-beta even) and doesn't yet support debugging on a physical device, but I still take this as great news. I think allowing developers to download and try CIDR now will give JetBrains the feedback they need to deliver a great finished product.
rodh257 16y ago
JetBrains does a lot of good things. The fact that they bring their ideas to a number of different languages is a great thing. Resharper, IntelliJ, RubyMine, PyCharm, Phpstorm and now AppCode - you could stick purely to Jetbrains products and have a familiar IDE layout and functionality for the various different application development tasks you undertake.
upinsmoke 16y ago
Competition is always good. Just wish that you don't have to download Xcode again with every iOS SDK update.
- oemera 16y ago
  I never understood that. Is there a good reason why everyone have to download 4gb for each XCode and iOS SDK release?
stevejohnson 16y ago
At first I was excited that Xcode had some competition, so I downloaded this as soon as it was available. Unfortunately, it has a crappy Java-generic GUI. For an IDE for a platform that makes a big deal out of user experience, it really looks awful. (And it manages to be slower than Xcode 4!) I understand that tools don't have to be pretty to be functional, but I draw the line here.
- frou_dh 16y ago
  Same deal with MonoDevelop. These alien GUIs look absolutely miserable in OS X alongside the system and all the tastefully done third party native apps you have running.
  - jasonlotito 16y ago
    Unfortunately, outside of xcode, their is no other competition. No other IDE comes close. Considering this release is a pre-beta (and not some faux-beta popular with web two point oh startups these days). Having used other Jetbrains products, I'm fairly certain that when all is said and done, the final product will be solid IDE.
    - msbarnett 16y ago
      > Having used other Jetbrains products, I'm fairly certain that when all is said and done, the final product will be solid IDE. It probably will be solid, but having used their other products on the Mac (RubyMine, IntelliJ), it's probably never going to get any less java-ugly or feel any more native. And I think that's likely to be more of a problem for potential users of AppCode vs RubyMine or IntelliJ users on the Mac. Because its target market is either established Mac developers who care about the conventions and tastes prevalent in Mac software, and thus find AppCode ugly and alien in function, or users of other JetBrains products getting started with Mac development, for whom AppCode might feel familiar but will be a barrier to learning about the conventions and tastes prevalent in Mac software, leading them to produce sub-par experiences with the product.
      - chrismsnz 16y ago
        Meh - it's not for those us who like everything in its place, fully native "oh my god it's so elegant" software. It's for those of us who want something that does everything we want (plus some more) without being too hard on the system resources and has the ability to stay out of our way when we need it to. It's true, Jetbrains products are not the most beautiful, and yes they're mostly written in java. However, they do make incredibly functional products with a slim learning curve with some amazing features. Jetbrains products (from Python to Ruby to PHP, and I'm sure their new AppCode) have consistently shown the best understanding of the code being developed which contributes to the best code sense and refactoring support I've ever seen in any IDE.
xutopia 16y ago
What I would pay for is not another IDE but one that handles all the code signing bullshit for me. It's crazy the amount of errors a team can have regarding code signing and push notification certificates.
Samuel_Michon 16y ago
The project sounds cool, but the perspective of the bottle icon is way, way off.
callumjones 16y ago
I'm excited to see more additional development solutions for Objective C; but why are we taking a step backward with these awful Java like GUIs that have plagued Eclipse and NetBeans? Why in 2011, are people still building UI heavy applications with Java?
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  First, JetBrain IDEs that I've used are lightyears ahead of Eclipse and Netbeans in terms of performance. Secondly, they have a lot of established code written in Java. Thirdly, their other IDEs are cross platform. I'll wait and see how this turns out, but their other offerings are excellent.
- ohhmaagawd 16y ago
  Most of the great IDEs are java. Jetbrains makes their money in the java market, so seems reasonable to leverage their existing code base. Also, java gives you cross platform. Not an issue for AppCode, but it's a biggie for all their other languages (ruby, python, php, java)
- frou_dh 16y ago
  Why are JetBrains doing it? So they can reuse code. At least I hope that's why. If that team isn't sad about not being able to provide a proper Mac GUI then they're out of touch with what's good about the platform.
- jon914 16y ago
  Our startup's main product uses Java for a UI heavy app because makes it cross platform out of the box and is relatively easy to develop a nice, native looking UI with if you know what you're after. Our closest competitors locked themselves to one platform and have faced challenges trying to go cross platform.
  - callumjones 16y ago
    Chrome and Firefox seem to do a good job of going cross platform.
joubert 16y ago
I can't imagine they can compete with XCode 4 and its excellent integration with profiling tools, LLVM, etc.
eweise 16y ago
As a java developer that needs to also support native iphone and android apps, this is a huge win for me. Its very nice to jump around projects using the same familiar keystrokes and functions.
ohhmaagawd 16y ago
just for reference, here's what it looks like: http://cl.ly/5rbn http://cl.ly/5rbn doesn't look ugly to me. Looks clean actually...
- msbarnett 16y ago
  Clean, perhaps, but absolutely non-native, which is generally considered an ugly quality on OS X.
  - wtallis 16y ago
    The disclosure triangles and combo box look native. The icons, scrollbars, tabs, toolbars, status bar, tip-of-the-day dialog (wtf?), and confirmation dialogs all are obviously non-native, some of them in ways that are trivially fixable (such as getting the button order right in the confirmation dialogs). I understand that it's pre-beta, but if they consider the current GUI to be even a prototype instead of the placeholder that it is, they'll likely never get any traction outside of Java developers trying to cash in on Apple's App Stores.
    - masklinn 16y ago
      > but if they consider the current GUI to be even a prototype instead of the placeholder that it is I doubt it is. It's not the first Jetbrains IDE on OSX. They may decide to go a very different graphical route for this one as it's pretty obviously OSX-only, but that's not really a given.
nevster 16y ago
I don't think most Xcode users know what they're missing. And unfortunately they still won't, just by looking at screenshots and perhaps firing this up and having a quick bash around. Some really good screencasts are needed to show what's possible with appCode - fortunately JetBrains does excellent screencasts for their other products and I'm sure they'll do these as it gets closer to release. As for me, I'm a long-time IntelliJ user. Xcode 3 has been incredibly painful to use - even after taking a lot of time and effort to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Xcode 4 is a major step in the right direction and started to actually make iOS coding reasonably fun. But it still can't hold a candle to the features available in this early release of appCode - it's awesome.
- nevster 16y ago
  Here is one small example of something that won't be apparent to someone without a demonstration. Say I have a class called Foo and I realise, as I'm using it, that I want to add a method called doSomethingElse, I can just type the new method call and have appCode create the method for me. Ie: Foo *foo = [[Foo alloc] init]; [foo doSomething]; [foo doSomethingElse] doSomethingElse would be marked in red. I just have to hit command-enter, select 'Create method' and appCode creates the method signature in Foo.h, creates the method in Foo.m and puts the cursor in the body of the method ready to implement it. This improves coding flow remarkably.
  - msbarnett 16y ago
    That strikes me as a good example of where the kinds of features JetBrains is known for don't really mesh with Objective-C. If doSomethingElse is a method defined in a category I expect to be loaded at runtime, or something I expect to be caught by foo's forwardInvocation method, having it turn red and bug me to provide an implementation in Foo is exactly the wrong thing to do. It's the kind of little feature that really only makes sense in the context of a static language like C#, where a method call without a corresponding method implementation can be known definitively to be an error.
    - nevster 16y ago
h7brid 16y ago
I am sure it will get polished before the final release. All IntelliJ IDEs can install a very functional VIM plugin - that itself is a big deal for me!
- wriq 16y ago
  Having a vim plug-in for Xcode 4 would make my year. For longer coding sessions i've been editing in MacVim with cocoa.vim and clang_complete.
GeneralMaximus 16y ago
I noticed it has the new "vanishing" scrollbars. Looks a little ugly, but it's not that bad. I expect it will get better with time. I like the color-coded tabs and easy tab switching. The editor itself lags a bit. Strangely enough, it didn't recognize my .mm files as Objective-C++ files.
pilif 16y ago
I know the GUI might not look nice due to being Java, but if AppCode will get as much polish and as many features as IDEA or the smaller language specific IDEs got, then AppCode is something to really look forward to. Even after a year of constantly using PhpStorm (yeah - still no time to rewrite that huge app I'm maintaining) I'm still finding little things that show that the IDE was really made by developers. It's just like with the iPhone: It's full of little nice touches. Recently, I was pissed of enough about the typo in the name of an interface: IModuleAmmendment and I had PhpStorm rename refactor it. Of course it worked (and instantly over 800 files), but it also fixed the typo in a class implementing the interface (CatalogModuleAmmendment was for example renamed to CatalogModuleAmendment). And that's just a sample: The IDEs are full of these little things. This makes me so productive that I can easily live with the less-than-perfect looking UI. This sounds like a commercial, but I'm really just a (incredibly) happy customer of theirs.
- chrismsnz 16y ago
  Absolutely. PhpStorm is simply the best IDE I've used for our very large PHP application. And I've tried almost all of them.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- danssig 16y ago
  People who are different make you laugh? Thanks for sharing.
mattyohe 16y ago
Ah good, something we can point to the next time someone complains about XCode.

71 points by oemera 16y ago

I am very excited to try this since XCode has really needed a suitable alternative for a while.

I've wished many times for ReSharper-like refactoring in Xcode. Now JetBrains (the ReSharper people) have announced CIDR, an Objective-C IDE. Apparently CIDR is still at an early stage (pre-beta even) and doesn't yet support debugging on a physical device, but I still take this as great news. I think allowing developers to download and try CIDR now will give JetBrains the feedback they need to deliver a great finished product.

rodh257 16y ago

JetBrains does a lot of good things. The fact that they bring their ideas to a number of different languages is a great thing. Resharper, IntelliJ, RubyMine, PyCharm, Phpstorm and now AppCode - you could stick purely to Jetbrains products and have a familiar IDE layout and functionality for the various different application development tasks you undertake.

upinsmoke 16y ago

Competition is always good. Just wish that you don't have to download Xcode again with every iOS SDK update.

oemera 16y ago
I never understood that. Is there a good reason why everyone have to download 4gb for each XCode and iOS SDK release?

stevejohnson 16y ago

At first I was excited that Xcode had some competition, so I downloaded this as soon as it was available. Unfortunately, it has a crappy Java-generic GUI. For an IDE for a platform that makes a big deal out of user experience, it really looks awful. (And it manages to be slower than Xcode 4!) I understand that tools don't have to be pretty to be functional, but I draw the line here.

frou_dh 16y ago
Same deal with MonoDevelop. These alien GUIs look absolutely miserable in OS X alongside the system and all the tastefully done third party native apps you have running.
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  Unfortunately, outside of xcode, their is no other competition. No other IDE comes close. Considering this release is a pre-beta (and not some faux-beta popular with web two point oh startups these days). Having used other Jetbrains products, I'm fairly certain that when all is said and done, the final product will be solid IDE.
  - msbarnett 16y ago
    > Having used other Jetbrains products, I'm fairly certain that when all is said and done, the final product will be solid IDE. It probably will be solid, but having used their other products on the Mac (RubyMine, IntelliJ), it's probably never going to get any less java-ugly or feel any more native. And I think that's likely to be more of a problem for potential users of AppCode vs RubyMine or IntelliJ users on the Mac. Because its target market is either established Mac developers who care about the conventions and tastes prevalent in Mac software, and thus find AppCode ugly and alien in function, or users of other JetBrains products getting started with Mac development, for whom AppCode might feel familiar but will be a barrier to learning about the conventions and tastes prevalent in Mac software, leading them to produce sub-par experiences with the product.
    - chrismsnz 16y ago
      Meh - it's not for those us who like everything in its place, fully native "oh my god it's so elegant" software. It's for those of us who want something that does everything we want (plus some more) without being too hard on the system resources and has the ability to stay out of our way when we need it to. It's true, Jetbrains products are not the most beautiful, and yes they're mostly written in java. However, they do make incredibly functional products with a slim learning curve with some amazing features. Jetbrains products (from Python to Ruby to PHP, and I'm sure their new AppCode) have consistently shown the best understanding of the code being developed which contributes to the best code sense and refactoring support I've ever seen in any IDE.

xutopia 16y ago

What I would pay for is not another IDE but one that handles all the code signing bullshit for me. It's crazy the amount of errors a team can have regarding code signing and push notification certificates.

Samuel_Michon 16y ago

The project sounds cool, but the perspective of the bottle icon is way, way off.

callumjones 16y ago

I'm excited to see more additional development solutions for Objective C; but why are we taking a step backward with these awful Java like GUIs that have plagued Eclipse and NetBeans? Why in 2011, are people still building UI heavy applications with Java?

jasonlotito 16y ago
First, JetBrain IDEs that I've used are lightyears ahead of Eclipse and Netbeans in terms of performance. Secondly, they have a lot of established code written in Java. Thirdly, their other IDEs are cross platform. I'll wait and see how this turns out, but their other offerings are excellent.
ohhmaagawd 16y ago
Most of the great IDEs are java. Jetbrains makes their money in the java market, so seems reasonable to leverage their existing code base. Also, java gives you cross platform. Not an issue for AppCode, but it's a biggie for all their other languages (ruby, python, php, java)
frou_dh 16y ago
Why are JetBrains doing it? So they can reuse code. At least I hope that's why. If that team isn't sad about not being able to provide a proper Mac GUI then they're out of touch with what's good about the platform.
jon914 16y ago
Our startup's main product uses Java for a UI heavy app because makes it cross platform out of the box and is relatively easy to develop a nice, native looking UI with if you know what you're after. Our closest competitors locked themselves to one platform and have faced challenges trying to go cross platform.
- callumjones 16y ago
  Chrome and Firefox seem to do a good job of going cross platform.

joubert 16y ago

I can't imagine they can compete with XCode 4 and its excellent integration with profiling tools, LLVM, etc.

eweise 16y ago

As a java developer that needs to also support native iphone and android apps, this is a huge win for me. Its very nice to jump around projects using the same familiar keystrokes and functions.

ohhmaagawd 16y ago

just for reference, here's what it looks like: http://cl.ly/5rbn http://cl.ly/5rbn doesn't look ugly to me. Looks clean actually...

msbarnett 16y ago
Clean, perhaps, but absolutely non-native, which is generally considered an ugly quality on OS X.
- wtallis 16y ago
  The disclosure triangles and combo box look native. The icons, scrollbars, tabs, toolbars, status bar, tip-of-the-day dialog (wtf?), and confirmation dialogs all are obviously non-native, some of them in ways that are trivially fixable (such as getting the button order right in the confirmation dialogs). I understand that it's pre-beta, but if they consider the current GUI to be even a prototype instead of the placeholder that it is, they'll likely never get any traction outside of Java developers trying to cash in on Apple's App Stores.
  - masklinn 16y ago
    > but if they consider the current GUI to be even a prototype instead of the placeholder that it is I doubt it is. It's not the first Jetbrains IDE on OSX. They may decide to go a very different graphical route for this one as it's pretty obviously OSX-only, but that's not really a given.

nevster 16y ago

I don't think most Xcode users know what they're missing. And unfortunately they still won't, just by looking at screenshots and perhaps firing this up and having a quick bash around. Some really good screencasts are needed to show what's possible with appCode - fortunately JetBrains does excellent screencasts for their other products and I'm sure they'll do these as it gets closer to release. As for me, I'm a long-time IntelliJ user. Xcode 3 has been incredibly painful to use - even after taking a lot of time and effort to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Xcode 4 is a major step in the right direction and started to actually make iOS coding reasonably fun. But it still can't hold a candle to the features available in this early release of appCode - it's awesome.

nevster 16y ago
Here is one small example of something that won't be apparent to someone without a demonstration. Say I have a class called Foo and I realise, as I'm using it, that I want to add a method called doSomethingElse, I can just type the new method call and have appCode create the method for me. Ie: Foo *foo = [[Foo alloc] init]; [foo doSomething]; [foo doSomethingElse] doSomethingElse would be marked in red. I just have to hit command-enter, select 'Create method' and appCode creates the method signature in Foo.h, creates the method in Foo.m and puts the cursor in the body of the method ready to implement it. This improves coding flow remarkably.
- msbarnett 16y ago
  That strikes me as a good example of where the kinds of features JetBrains is known for don't really mesh with Objective-C. If doSomethingElse is a method defined in a category I expect to be loaded at runtime, or something I expect to be caught by foo's forwardInvocation method, having it turn red and bug me to provide an implementation in Foo is exactly the wrong thing to do. It's the kind of little feature that really only makes sense in the context of a static language like C#, where a method call without a corresponding method implementation can be known definitively to be an error.
  - nevster 16y ago

h7brid 16y ago

I am sure it will get polished before the final release. All IntelliJ IDEs can install a very functional VIM plugin - that itself is a big deal for me!

wriq 16y ago
Having a vim plug-in for Xcode 4 would make my year. For longer coding sessions i've been editing in MacVim with cocoa.vim and clang_complete.

GeneralMaximus 16y ago

I noticed it has the new "vanishing" scrollbars. Looks a little ugly, but it's not that bad. I expect it will get better with time. I like the color-coded tabs and easy tab switching. The editor itself lags a bit. Strangely enough, it didn't recognize my .mm files as Objective-C++ files.

pilif 16y ago

I know the GUI might not look nice due to being Java, but if AppCode will get as much polish and as many features as IDEA or the smaller language specific IDEs got, then AppCode is something to really look forward to. Even after a year of constantly using PhpStorm (yeah - still no time to rewrite that huge app I'm maintaining) I'm still finding little things that show that the IDE was really made by developers. It's just like with the iPhone: It's full of little nice touches. Recently, I was pissed of enough about the typo in the name of an interface: IModuleAmmendment and I had PhpStorm rename refactor it. Of course it worked (and instantly over 800 files), but it also fixed the typo in a class implementing the interface (CatalogModuleAmmendment was for example renamed to CatalogModuleAmendment). And that's just a sample: The IDEs are full of these little things. This makes me so productive that I can easily live with the less-than-perfect looking UI. This sounds like a commercial, but I'm really just a (incredibly) happy customer of theirs.

chrismsnz 16y ago
Absolutely. PhpStorm is simply the best IDE I've used for our very large PHP application. And I've tried almost all of them.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

danssig 16y ago
People who are different make you laugh? Thanks for sharing.

mattyohe 16y ago

Ah good, something we can point to the next time someone complains about XCode.