It’s been a few years since I’ve written in Objective C for iOS and used Xcode, and I must say it has changed/matured a lot since then.

The first time, thrown into the middle of an intense project, was a crash course in the intricacies of the language and IDE. And being mainly a Java front end dev back then with very limited C experience was interesting to say the least.

But I’m glad to say that alot has changed since then, and for the better. After giving some documentation a once over and playing around with things, lots of the oddities that I saw coming to the language as a Java developer have now been improved.

The biggest things for me (so far) I think were:

  • Automatic synthesizing of properties.
  • Automatic reference counting (ARC). It puzzled me that writing code for the OS had memory management, but you had to manually manage for iOS.
  • Setting up your project with unit tests is a breeze.

There are other things, and if you haven’t looked at it in a while you might be pleasantly surprised.