"The Xcode 4 interface should not imitate iTunes."

The new design has its problems, but this kind of feedback isn't specific enough.

The team did try to clean up the mess, and were successful in some areas. A modern, single-window design is laudable. But the document handling is just abysmal, as it has always been in Xcode.

The tabs don't make sense (they're even upside-down); the "counterpart" button is gone; you can't split the editor without invoking this misguided "assistant"; error messages appear in this narrow column on the left, so of course they're truncated to the point of uselessness and if you go to the results and put them in the main editing pane, it doesn't pull up the relevant source code at the same time.

Aside from the document-handling fiasco, there are lots of plain old bugs in Xcode 4. Worst of all is that it simply won't build a lot of projects that worked fine in Xcode 3, stopping people's work in its tracks.

Do you mean Chris Espinosa? He isn't working on Xcode.

And is definitely not insane.

And Chris is a reasonable guy.

I think it is probably imitating Instruments, which imitates iTunes.

i'm still hoping i'll get used to it. i can't believe steve doesnt make the xcode team take on an interface designer.

You really think the developer tools team doesn't have a UI designer?

At least the one they've got got pretty disconnected from the developer's point of view.

When I want to build my project I do not want to press a play button.

I just checked Eclipse: Green circle with a white, right-pointing triangle. Then I checked Netbeans: Green right-pointing triangle. Both of these are unmistakable icons for 'play'. Edit: I even googled for screenshots of Visual Studio...green right-facing triangle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vs2010rtm.png

Could there be a more universal idiom in the world of IDEs?

What kind of button would you want to press?

\C-c c

really, cause that's exactly what button I look for when I'm in an IDE trying to figure out how to run a project. I'm sitting here looking at intellij which has a 'play' button for running code.

He said BUILD, not RUN.

Guys, try reading his post: "When I want to build my project I do not want to press a play button."

He said BUILD, not RUN. A Play button is to build and RUN the project. I agree with his objection: There's no Build button in the UI.

And even worse is the width of the combined drop-down list for configurations. There's a vast expanse of empty space in the (now non-customizable) toolbar, and they made this control SMALLER. The information it should be providing is cut off in all cases, even with short project names. I try to be sympathetic to the Xcode team's tasks, but this is idiotic.

Me thinks you haven't been programming long if you don't know what the green triangle does. It's been a "play button" for over a decade.

The green button RUNS the program, building it first if necessary. Where did he say he wants to run the program?

I think the problem is more that they change the design too often. Maybe this is because they get a new interface designer who has new ideas.

But then they end up doing things like throwing out a working documentation viewer and replacing it with a new design that doesn't work.