XCode, I hate you. From hell’s heart, I spit at thee!

And now I have to now spend time figuring out what the f*#$ is going on with this piece of crap now. Yay! Time-saver!

UPDATE: The problem I had was related to indexing the project. Recently I tried using indexing again and it all finally seems to be working. Yay! But I still hate it

12/1/2006 Oh happy day! Life is great! After doing a lot of investigating and reading, I decided I’d finally go ahead and order me a new X60 ThinkPad with the SXGA screen. I was given an estimated ship date of 12/15. After I put it through I thought perhaps I’d have to get two day shipping just in case so I could get it before I have to leave for Christmas. So I called and they had to completely redo my order. Not sure why, but there you have it. In any case, I was now all set with two-day shipping.

12/8/2006 I get another email. Why? It didn’t say… so I went to look at the web site. My ship date was now the 19th. This was getting close to when I had to fly home for Christmas. Now my two day shipping wouldn’t help me unless it shipped early. So I waited.

12/18/2006 It hadn’t shipped so I called to get the address changed to get it shipped to where I was going to be for Christmas.

12/19/2006 Theoretical ship day. I went to the site to make sure my address was now my new ship-to address. It wasn’t. I wasn’t pleased. But then I looked up and my ship date was 2/6/2007!! I should note that I did not get an email this time. So now they’ve not only not changed my ship-to address, but they’ve moved my ship date out over a month, all without informing me in any way. Very annoying.

So I called and asked what was up. I spoke to one guy that didn’t seem to be able to tell me much of anything and he could write a note to the shipping department and someone would contact me in a business day. I asked why can’t he tell me right now what’s backordered. He didn’t have a good answer. In the end I had to run to a meeting so I just hung up a bit rudely (and who can blame me at this point).

After my meeting I called back and got someone who had more of a clue. I told him the whole story about how the only reason I got two day shipping was to get it before I left for vacation, but since my ship date was moved out to crazyland, I would hardly need it anymore. I asked him to remove the two day shipping and change my ship-to address back to my bill-to address. He confirmed he would do both things. I also asked what the holdup was as the current estimated ship time on the site was 1-3 weeks (same as when I ordered. I should also mention that I had checked the week previous just to see what their lead time was and it was 1-5 days). He said the ones with the SXGA screens were all on backorder. Why did they not know that three weeks ago when I ordered? I asked if the new date was any more real than the last one. He said yeah. I highly doubt it.

12/21/2006 I get two emails from them (Thanks for your order. Yay.) and again I have to go to the site to guess what’s different. Seems my ship date slipped out again to 2/9 and my ship-to address was changed… to the exact address I asked that it NOT be sent to any longer. So I had to call these idiots again to get my address changed. Then I decided to write to the email address in the emails they send me to complain about how this order has been handled.

To date, noone from shipping ever contacted me within that ‘one business day’ window that one guy told me. Nor has anyone answered my complaint email. Of course, the latter could just be because of the time of year.

But at the end of the day, they told me 1-3 weeks originally now it’s like 2 months from my order date. And they have bungled my address changes twice now. They really need to get their act together. I am sitting here wondering why I haven’t already cancelled. It’s just too bad they get to treat their individual customers like crap. I bet their corporate customers aren’t having these sorts of issues.

Screw you Lenovo.

Simple as that. I hate it. It sucks. The sad part is they really think they have something there. But the only thing they have is a worthless lump of crud. The other day it decided to thrash my system for no apparent reason. Same sources as always, etc. but it took about 10 minutes of thrashing before it stopped. My attempts to watch what was going on in ‘top’ saw memory down to 16MB (I have 2G). After it subsided (and I had tried killing that damn thing and starting over, but it did it again), I was greeted with 1.8 gig of memory again. That’s right, to build my (somewhat small) project, it pretty much ate every living resource on the planet.

Even when at Apple, I never really used it, mostly because it could never build our project. Our project had too many files, and had many different sections with differing compilation options. When we were finally able to get the files into a version of Project Builder/XCode that would hold them, the scrolling list of files was so slow that I just threw the project away. Before you judge how many files were in there, keep in mind that this list was a disclosable one, and even with the groups closed it was still slow. So basically it was calculating something (who knows what) based on the total number of files instead of what was actually showing. Sweet. It might be easy to write things in Cocoa, but it’s also incredibly simple to write a poor performing Cocoa app.

On top of the occasional performance issues that still plague it (for example, failure to keep up with your typing – I mean, a dual G5 should be plenty to process keystrokes), it has its options spread all over the place, which makes it incredibly difficult to manage. Half the things you want to do are in non-obvious places, or buried in some dialog, etc. I have no idea why they put the UI together the way they did. It’s ridiculous. I can never remember where some option is, or how to easily tell what the current options for this or that are.

Visual Studio, on the other, hand, is incredibly well done in comparison. It has its own set of quirks, but all the little features it gives you and the ability to debug quickly and easily make it quite pleasant to develop with. Things are pretty logically layed out. Once you get your head around how it does things, you’re all set. An interesting example is debugging, the fact that you’d use function keys to run the debugger was something laughable to me at first. I mean, come on, function keys? What year am I in? But let me tell you… it’s soooo much easier than any modifier-key-based solution I’ve seen on the Mac. Fact is: it works damn well. VS is also so much more stable than xcode. It does occasionally die (mostly when trying to attach the debugger to a process), but other than that it’s pretty solid.

Going back to use xcode after being in VS-land for so long was a rude awakening, and made it truly clear how far from the mark Apple is with their tools. Maybe it’s all part of their ingenious plan to scare developers away from the platform so they can concentrate on selling more iPods. If so, they’re off to a good start! Next time, I’ll rant about the poor documentation on the Apple site…