5 Reasons Why I Fell in Love with Xcode

Xcode is great mostly | Update on May 15th, 2017

Bob Lee

Published in

Bob the Developer

4 min readOct 22, 2016

1. Auto-Completion

You’ve probably experienced typing some words on Google even though you did not remember the exact name or spelling, but you still found the answer.

Just like Google, it auto-completes entire syntax and indicates its functionality. Recently, I have learned Javascript using Sublime Text Editor. I found Swift more convenient since it does more auto-finding for me. In other words, the only thing I needed to know was that things exist.

2. Instant Reward and Fix

The benefit of using Swift would be the environment(Xcode) Swift is written. It not only autocompletes syntax, but it also shows the result instantly in Playgrounds. Playgrounds is an extension of Xcode where you can write many lines of code to test or simply “play” around. It will run the code without pressing a button, saving, or refresh.

Since you get the instant result, it allows you to figure out the problem in the early stage so that you don’t have to spend time figuring out a missing bracket which might lead to dozens of errors. If there is an error, I copy the message and paste on Google. Most of the time, I figured out the issue and learned more than the problem itself.

3. Drag and Drop

Even though large companies avoid using the drag and drop approach to building an app, it allows beginners to grasp the concept of iOS development. Storyboard is a place where you insert multiple screens. In each screen, you can drop buttons, texts, images, and so on. You can change attributes of these items without writing a single line of code. It somewhat resembles Photoshop and Powerpoint. Of course, if you want to make an app dynamic, you have to code. For those who are already familiar with UX/UI, you will find the drag and drop approach likable.

Recently, I have decided to abandon Storyboard to design an user interface. The production speed has gotten faster since I constantly put my hands on the keyboard throughout. It is controversial which approach is better, but I think beginners should take the advantage of figuring out the ecosystem along with the friendly graphic user interface.

4. Awesome Documentation/Online Courses

If you decide to learn Swift, there are a lot of resources out there. In my case, I learned through YouTube, Udacity, Treehouse, Apple’s OfficialeBook, Lynda, and Udemy.

Once I got the hang of it, I began to download other people’s projects and dissect how other developers code. I copied their style and kept learning of my own. Another major benefit is that Apple has a strict quality control for its products. As a result, they provide well-written documentations and guidelines that allow beginner developers to teach themselves. Of course, the online community is fabulous. People want to share their knowledge and contribute. Thanks to those generous developers out there, I was able to learn from them despite having no mentor around.

5. Xcode, That’s it

For the past two months, I have been learning React.js which is a front-web development library built by Facebook that allows you to dynamically generates content without refreshing a page. Meanwhile, there was a dozen of libraries I had to import in order to make a simple to-do list web app.

Also, the front-end web ecosystem disrupts year after year since it is mainly built by passionate people around the world. There are hundreds if not thousands of projects going on at the same time. You might find yourself struggling to catch up with new trends. While iOS is primarily built by Apple engineers and iOS offers features otherwise you have to import manually in web development.

As a result, the front-web-development ecosystem changes a lot especially when there is a better framework or library, while iOS fairly remains constant. If you have not typed, “Hello, World” before, You might get easily overwhelmed by the number of external software you have to use. Of course, if you plan to make a static website with HTML/CSS and Javascript, that’s a different story. It’s just that you won’t get paid as much.