What's New in XCode 5 Part 3

What's New in XCode 5 Part 3

This is part 3 of the Series What's New in XCode 5. In Part 2 we had discussed what's new in

• Interface Design
• Compiler and Language
• Auto Vectorizer
• Parsing the Comments

XCode 5 is so fast and stable as the transition from GC to ARC has be completed with XCode 5... :) It has been 2 years since ARC has come into picture and has been great thing happen. Apple has announced that GC is deprecated technology and those developers who are using GC in Mac should switch to ARC and they will notice the change. Besides this enhancement there are still other features which we need to discuss..

XCode Debugger

Similar to Compiler XCode supported two different Debuggers "LLDB" and "GDB". Now with XCode 5 only LLDB debugger is available and gdb is gone. New features of debugger are:

DataTips 

Datatips allow you to see your variable value while you are stepping through it. It shows the variable description right there, now you do not have to go to the console to see it. Here is view hw Datatip shows the description

Looking at the text is better but looking the graphical view is even better. here take a look.

Debug Gauges 

Performance is one thing which is easily ignored.. :). In the modern technology the processor are so fast and you are accidentally consuming way too much power. We take care of performance if our app is very slow or when our client start reporting problems. Now with debug gauges you can actually see what is happening.

Debug gauges show up right on top of the debug navigator. When you select any of one of the debug gauges like CPU, Memory, iCloud, Energy or OpenGL ES, it will show more details. 

Test Navigator

Navigators exists in XCode to define the common workflow that you use in your application. Now with Test Navigator I can see all the tests in my app and I can choose to Run One, Run all of them or Run Some of them right from the Navigator.

With XCode 5 it brings in new test framework "XCTest". Now whenever we run the code we do not want to run the tests manually, now this is possible with new feature called "Bots"

Bots 

A bot runs on the Xcode server. In addition to just running tests bots can keep track of the History. XCode provides an interface for exploring the Bot. If anything happen wrong in an integration than XCode can find out what went wrong. Bots can run in different configurations but there are two recommended configurations:

a) Continuous  Bot

b) Periodic Bot

Bots are really powerful for automating the different build and integration tasks. We will have separate blog or video for the Bots.

These are the new features in XCode 5.

View the Previous Part of series. 

Happy coding!!