iOS Tips and Tricks
Having a knowledge of keyboard shortcuts and plugins for your coding environment can make you a more efficient and effective developer. Here are some tips and tricks our iOS developers have picked up.
Useful Keyboard Shortcuts
- cmd-shift-o – Quickly jump to a particular symbol within a project – This searches classes, methods, protocols, functions, etc.
- cmd-shift-2 – Bring up organizer.
- cmd-n – Create a new file.
- cmd-f – Find.
- cmd-click – Command click on a symbol (such as a class or method) to go to its source code.
- option-click – Option click on a symbol (such as a class or a method) to display information.
Crash Info
- exception breakpoint – setup Xcode to break within your code when an exception occurs
- How to: Choose the breakpoint tab in the Xcode Navigator View, click the plus at the bottom and add an exception breakpoint.
- Sometimes, crashes happen when you’re not developing. Use a crash reporting framework such as Crashlytics or Crittercism to easily determine the problem.
General Xcode
- Use Xcode Plugins
- Alcatraz is good plugin manager for Xcode which makes installs and uninstalls very easy.
- Polychromatic is a plugin which is available in Alcatraz that assigns a different color to each of your variables and uses good looking desaturated colors.
- OMColorSense which is also available in Alcatraz gives you a color picker while working with NSColor in code.
- SCXCodeSwitchExpander which is in Alcatraz gives you Switch cases autocompletion in Xcode.
- KSImageNamed also in Alcatraz give you autocomplete for imageNamed calls.
- Xcode Color Themes
- Type method names without the return type for easy code completion:
- Typing the return type (as shown below) is unnecessary:
- You can simply type “-” without the return type and all matching method names will appear in code completion:
Helpful Links
- Differentiating iOS Devices
- Apple’s Xcode Menu Commands
