When developing iOS or OS X software our main tool is the Xcode IDE provided by Apple. While Xcode seems very clean and not so feature-rich at first glance, it provides quite some useful hidden features. I’d like to give a quick introduction to a couple of feature that can help you keep track of what is going on with your code while you’re working on it.

TODO

Use this comment style to embed the To-do items

FIXME

The FIXME comment style can be helpful on reminding yourself that there is broken or generally not properly working code which should get some treatment.

Besides these small features that are already built into Xcode, there are other enhancements which can make daily work more smooth. A huge list of features not included by Xcode can be equipped via Plugins. A quick web search for “Xcode plugins” will present you lots of resources that might or might not be useful to you. My 2 favourites are:

• BBUncrustify, which automatically formats your code beautifully
• VVDocumenter, which reduces the amount of typing work necessary to properly document your code to generate documentation with appledoc, Doxygen or HeaderDoc.