Focusing just on Xcode for a second, the spirit of the rant is not totally off the mark. The latest version 4, has been, on the whole, a step back. If you were

Focusing just on Xcode for a second, the spirit of the rant is not totally off the mark. The latest version 4, has been, on the whole, a step back. If you were used to Xcode 3, suddenly a lot of functionality is no longer there, or moved, or replaced, or hidden away in a deep recess. To make things worse, a lot of documentation is now hilariously out of date. For example, just about any Core Data guide/sample code/tutorial is not applicable to the brave new world of Xcode 4 (or iOS 4 or OS X 10.7). And there's no indication that any of them will be updated anytime soon -- I speak mostly of Apple's own docs. In other words, there's a lot of pain, currently, surrounding the de facto tool for iOS development, even for seasoned Cocoa programmers. It's too bad the original story (the one Gruber's responding to) got so off track talking about other nonsense (reference counting?! Does that objectively really matter?) when there are so many real problems that actually exist with iOS development. Thankfully, these problems aren't necessarily permanent -- just as long as Xcode 4 continues to get refined/fixed, and documentation is brought up-to-date (i.e. no more Core Data how-to videos that use Xcode 3 on OS X 10.4!).