#wwdc2019: Xcode 11

In today’s episode of Mac Power Users Doug Brooks, Apple’s Product Manager for the new Mac Pro, among many other interesting things mentioned their internal Pro division is working with professionals not only to reduce render/computation times, but also to bring down small delays in repetitive actions that users perform daily using software, such as improving responsiveness in dialog boxes you have to interact with very often.

That attention to speed was paramount to Xcode 11 development was very clear to me immediately after launching it the other night, just after the State of the Union: resizing the window, jumping around in code, scrolling, everything seems a bit snappier, like milliseconds have been shaved around and animations have been shortened.

Xcode 11 just feels fast, not in terms of compile time (haven’t timed anything yet), but of user interactions, and I think it’s something I will appreciate every day, if I’ll actually be a good boy and open Xcode every day…

On top of that, touches like the Mini Map to glance at all your code in the sidebar, and the general revision of the Assistant Editor paradigm look like improvements that can build up significat savings in terms of time and concentration, day after day.

As I mentioned yesterday, I haven’t had the chance to actually play around with the SwiftUI canvas, so I still miss real world experience with the most groundbreaking new feature.

I also still have to look into the integration of Swift Packages management inside Xcode; on paper, it seems like a really good reason to start thinking to leave CocoaPods behind whenever possible.

One thing I’d like to immediate take advantage of, on the other hand, is the inline viewer for code changes inside the source editor: no more copy, paste & comment of a block of code before a massive refactor to keep the original code available at a glance.

Obviously, as with every new release, there’s much more to Xcode 11, but my first impression is that my favourite IDE got even better.