My Top 5 Xcode Tricks

How to make the most out of Xcode

Developing apps in Xcode is great–most of the time, anyways.

Meme courtesy of @ios_memes

In Xcode, Apple provides many features that can help improve developer productivity and make debugging easier. Below are the top 5 Xcode features that help me in my day-to-day iOS development workflow:

1. Slow Animations

Testing animations can be tricky. Thankfully, Xcode has a feature that slows down animations in the simulator, that way you can see exactly how your views are moving or changing. To enable this feature, simply run your app, once in the simulator, click Debug in the top menu and then select Slow animations.

Xcode simulator’s Debug menu to enable slow animations.

Now, when you use your app in the simulator you should see views moving slowly. Here’s an example showing an expandable button slowly expanding and shrinking (see this article to learn how to build an expandable button in Swift):

Animated button with slow animations.

2. View Frame Debugging