Tips to improve your Xcode workflow

Xcode is an amazing tool to create iOS apps, but sometimes it can be a little clunky and slow down your workflow. Here are a couple of tips to improve your workflow, hopefully saving you time and headaches.

1. Track Build times

Build times are the worst thing about Xcode. To improve anything you first need some way of measuring it. To measure build times in Xcode in seconds open terminal and type this command:

defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode ShowBuildOperationDuration -bool YES

Afterwards you might need to restart Xcode to see the change. You should see build times appear in the top tool bar after each build.

Now you know how long your build time is, follow this article to reduce it.

2. Track app start time

App launch speed is one of the most important factors when creating an app. Users expect apps to launch instantly. Finding the source of a slow launch can be difficult. Outside of using profiler (which I plan to write another post on soon), it can be difficult to gauge what the start up time of your app is, and where to improve it.

One way you can improve the launch time by tracking everything before applicationDidFinishLaunching is called. This is when the app is…