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Category: Xcode

Slow, laggy Xcode? Maybe it’s not (just) Xcode…

Slow, laggy Xcode? Maybe it’s not (just) Xcode…

Published March 8, 2019

When you’re developing for iOS, there is pretty much no other game in town other than Xcode. And if you’ve needed to use it for any period of time, you know: it’s a memory hog. Not just Xcode, but the iOS simulator, Interface Builder, debugger… You can easily use several GB of memory with just the iOS development tools alone. If you have 8GB of RAM (or 4GB… 😱), it’s enough to bring Xcode to its knees, and your blood pressure to a boil. When your code completion starts lagging to the point you can’t type… 🤬

It’s 2019. Shouldn’t your machine be thinking faster than you?

But your problem may be more than just Xcode. You may want to look at what else is running on your machine to see if you need to put it on a RAM diet.

Read on »Slow, laggy Xcode? Maybe it’s not (just) Xcode…

Xcode and its iOS DeviceSupport directory: can I delete it?

Published January 4, 2019

Many of you are trying to do iOS development on a budget. I’ve mentioned it before: Macs are expensive. You may be trying to get by on a small SSD, or this is your main machine and Xcode is competing for space with, well, the rest of your (computing) life.

So you occasionally run your favorite disk usage tool, and you see something like this:

What the heck, Xcode? Gigabytes of space per iOS version?

I could be using that space for something useful. What is it for, and can I delete it?

Read on »Xcode and its iOS DeviceSupport directory: can I delete it?

Why do these $?@!% files keep changing? Stop the file churn in Xcode with a gitignore file

Published November 26, 2018

Xcode has had Source Control support via git for a long time. Somehow it’s amazing that even now, in its default configuration, you may find that all sorts of files that show up in your repos that you don’t want: .DS_Store, xcuserstate, build, .ipa files, just for starters.

You want to do the right thing, and you know or have heard that checking user-specific files, temporary files, or build products into source control is not the right thing. You want to avoid merge conflicts that result from files that frequently change. Or you’re just tired of doing something in your IDE, and suddenly your project has modified files to commit.

You should be able to tell Xcode that you want Source Control in your project, and it should handle everything the right way. But Xcode lets you down by not handling this correctly.

What do you do? The good news is that the solution is just a couple of steps away, by applying a gitignore file in your repo.

Read on »Why do these $?@!% files keep changing? Stop the file churn in Xcode with a gitignore file