OS X delivers
a very solid OS with great dev tools [...]
Seriously?
If you think Xcode is "great dev tools", then you need to get out more.
I feel like XCode used to be *better* dev tools. Honestly, I was most fond
of medium-early versions of CodeWarrior (before OS X, before OS 9, really;
the early "pro" versions), though that may be nostalgia talking more than
accurate recollection. XCode, like everything else, seems to have bloated
and gotten creaky with age (and I think the UI overhaul in 4.0 was a major
step backwards).
I can't stand Xcode 4, it seems to have been written by someone who doesn't
understand IDEs. I'd sooner use Eclipse. I could barely tolerate 2.x.
For that matter, Objective-C drives me crazy.
I use CodeWarrior 7 for Classilla and frankly there's no Mac development
tool that even comes close. The debugger is delightful, if "debugger" and
"delightful" can ever occur in the same utterance, and it integrates
well with MPW and all the other build tools that Jobs II Apple swept out.
The programs I create on OS X all compile from the command line. If I
absolutely have to use Xcode to build something, it's with xcodebuild, not
with GUI Xcode.
Same here. One important thing I keep 10.4+Classic around for is MPW...
--T