OK, I know it's not really anything to do with my own software projects but I connected my Garmin eTrex up to my recently purchased copy of Memory Map and just had to blog the results.

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Not wanting to be too far behind the curve I recently embarked on upgrading Pebble (the blog software running this site) to the latest version. Now this should be an easy upgrade with no more than about 3 steps but it was immediately apparent that something was wrong when I started getting 404s back from the server.

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Apple have recently posted a 'Working with Xcode 2.0' page and I am extremely pleased to read about some of the new features.

In the ManCave I use Xcode as the core of the majority of my development tool-chains, be they targeted at Mac OS X or Palm OS. However sometimes it just drives me crazy.

I always use the fastest machine I have for development and at the moment that's an iBook G4 with a 12" screen. On a screen of this size I'm forever hunting for the right .c or .h file. I normally use Exposé and while this is great for visually distinct graphics files, web pages or switching between applications it's next to useless for text files (see right). I usually end up hovering over each page and then using the tooltip to find the one I'm after. Furthermore I always seem to end up working on the same file simultaneously in multiple windows, be it the debugger, build result window or an editor. This just serves to compound the Exposé problem.

It comes as great relief to see that Xcode 2.0 supports the complete edit, build and debug lifecycle from single window with different modes for each function.

I also eagerly await the Visual Modelling feature. I'm a real fan of visual modelling and have created them for class or database structures in a professional capacity on many occasions. I find they're the quickest way to familiarise myself with the structure of a complex application so any tool that speeds up their generation will be a huge help. (I've used numerous other diagramming tools, mostly on PCs, but usually end up fighting the tool rather than generating the diagram so often revert to squared paper and a pencil out of frustration.)

One a final note there's only a quick mention of Subversion on Apple's page but I hope it is indicative of an improved relationship between Subversion and XCode because this has been somewhat tortuous in the past, especially with respect to NIB files.