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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

I have occasionally tried to put together a basic Mac app. I picked up the basics of Swift easily enough, but I get stuck because XCode seems completely incomprehensible to me, and my basic attempts at finding a "cheat sheet" or "idiots guide" meet with failure.

It's at this point I get frustrated enough to give up and maybe try again in another year.

Is it just me? Does XCode really lack basic documentation?

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Xcode has plenty of documentation, both first-party and third-party. However, I have yet to really find anything that really explains how you are supposed to use a particular part of it, rather than just instructions on what it can do. Xcode is one of those IDEs that is pretty smooth to use if you go with how it’s “supposed” to work and if you don’t it’s extremely rough, and there’s really no good, comprehensive guide that tells you how to do this. My best advice for you would be to watch various WWDC videos about the part you want to work on, where you’ll watch Apple engineers use it on stage. They’ll usually teach you a few things about the “logic” behind it and you’ll be able to use it productively after that.

it isn't just you, I've been doing iOS development for the last few years which generally gets preference for docs these days but I have still found over the years even if most things have documentation 1) it is pretty difficult to find 2) it is lacking. A lot of times you are better off going to 3rd party tutorials to get what you are looking for, I would recommend the Big Nerd Ranch books and Ray Wenderlich tutorials. I don't know if I have come across a general Xcode intro tutorial, maybe because Xcode is massive, most stuff is task oriented and you pick up the Xcode quirks along the way.

If you tried to build a Mac app based on Storyboards, which iirc has been the default for the past few years, then yes. All the docs are for iOS and the Mac side is completely under documented.

The classic way of building building apps is quite well documented though. It has been modernized quite a bit since Tiger and Xcode 2.0, but the general structure and workflow is the same as in this article, and there’s plenty of docs.

The new SwiftUI stuff is still under heavy development, and starting with the wwdc sessions is probably the best approach.

Under the Help menu and in the Xcode Help menu item it's thoroughly documented.

Did you have a go at Appcode from Jetbrains?

It’s been a while since I tried it, but iirc you had to context switch between XCode and AppCode if you wanted to use storyboards or whatever they’re called.

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