I'm currently writing code for four platforms, using three IDEs (Eclipse, XCode and VisualStudio), and it's driving me bonkers!

I've said it before, but I'll say it again - why oh why doesn't Apple consider freezing XCode development and switching over to using Eclipse. I know that XCode has some nice features but generally I find it pretty clunky and I can't believe that all the good stuff couldn't be reimplemented as Eclipse plug ins.

Eclipse, on the other hand, is really solid but a little bit lumbering and confusing at times - I'm sure it would really benefit from some Apple user interface input.

So once that's happened (I wish), I just need to convince Whole Tomato software to reimplement Visual Assist for Eclipse, and then I'd be laughing...

Every now and then I come back to using XCode for some reason or other.

And every time that this happens, I am once again amazed at just how bad it is in many ways, at least for C++ development.

My current bug-bear is the code auto-completion - when you start typing the name of a function or variable and it tries to jump in there and suggest something for you.

On the whole, the suggestions that it makes seem to have got a bit better since the last time I used it, and it seems to manage to make a suggestion in a reasonable amount of time (maybe that's just because I've got a MacPro now).

The interface for making the choice, however, is awful. The thing that's really annoying me is that there appears to be no way of having it pop up suggestions, but allowing you manual control over whether to accept a suggestion.

It seems that you either have to manually pop up the suggestion box (which I don't want to do - I always want it to suggest things), or you can have the box come up automatically, but as soon as you hit any key other than escape, the currently selected suggestion will get inserted. This is truly awful user interface, since I'd put the success rate for it's suggestions at 50% at best. What this means in practice is that it is endelessly inserting the wrong text, as I type quickly and often the suggestion box has come up, an insertion has been made, and it has gone away again - before I've even registered that it was there.

I really hope that I'm just being stupid, and that there's actually an option to make it put up the suggestion box, but only insert the suggestion if I press a particular key (e.g. Return). This is the way that Visual Assist works, and it's a lot more intuitive (not to mention a lot safer).

It's been a while since I used XCode, so I was a bit baffled when debugging recently when I couldn't find a way to view a wchar_t* based string.

Surely there must be a way?

As it turns out, there isn't a way to do this that's built in to XCode (amazing!), but XCode can be extended with plugins, and Apple provide a sample plugin that does what I wanted.

To save everyone else going through the same length process that I've just gone through, here's how you do it:

You can get the sample project from http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/WcharDataFormatter/.

Build it with XCode (I built the debug version), and copy the resulting wchardataformatter.bundle into "/Library/Application\ Support/Apple/Developer Tools/CustomDataViews/".

One pitfall to look out for - it appears that the bundle has to be built for the native architecture that you're running on. By default, the project is set up to build for ppc, so if you're on Intel you'll need to change this to i386.

Once you've installed the plugin and restarted Xcode, you should find that when viewing any wchar_t or wchar_t* string, the Summary column in the debugger contains the correct character/text.

I've just discovered something neat...

After executing the following command in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXBuildSuccessSound /Users/sam/Music/Codewarrior\ Clunk.aiff

My XCode now plays the familiar CodeWarrior "metal stamp" sound when my build finishes! Of course, you'll need to replace the path with a sound file of your own. I used Audio Hijack Pro to extract the clunk sound from a Codewarrior, but possibly it's out there on the net somewhere.

I've had an interesting time over the last year at Sony, but recently I started to realise that it wasn't really going in the direction that I wanted, and so I started to look around for alternatives.

As it turned out, my old friends at Sports Interactive were on the look out for a programmer. Things have moved on a lot at SI in the last couple of years, and to cut a long story short, I decided that I was very interested in going back there - and so, that's what I'm going to do.

The decision was made a while ago, but I've been keeping quiet about it until I actually left Sony, which happened this Tuesday. So on Monday, I'll be starting back at SI towers.

They say that you should never go back... but then they say all sorts of stupid stuff, so what do they know...

;)