Making iphone game development less painful.

Alright, I have been developing on games for the IPhone for about a month now. I have been extremely disappointed with both Objective C and the native development environment on the mac Xcode. Objective C is hard to learn as it does not allow you to scan through a classes' methods simply using the "." operator on a class instance as in c++,c# or Java in Visual Studio or Eclipse. Also, Xcode's lack of a tabbed window setup creates desktop clutter beyond belief leaving me much less effective then in a Visual Studio environment. With a month of pain and suffering behind me, here are a few suggestions to get more efficiency out of your development time. I assume here that if your programming games you'll be spending more a significant portion of your time programming c/c++.


1. When in Rome....
Don't always do what the Romans do. You only need to use Xcode for compiling and debugging. To this end, install VMWare Fusion on your mac, then a Windows instance with it. During the Windows install in Fusion, make sure to share the location(with read/write access) of your Xcode project with the virtual machine.








This will give you access to your source code allowing you to program in VS. Finally within your Windows instance, install Visual Studio 2008(VS) and Visual Assist X(not required but highly recommended). Finally, with Windows booted up and VS running, create a solution next to your Xcode project and import the source tree. Now, you'll be coding c++ in arguably the best IDE out there, while still having Xcode at hand to compile and debug.

2. Objective C Syntax Highlighting...kinda
Eventually you may need to access Objective C .mm files which VS does not support highlighting by default. This leaves you looking ugly black text code. Not having found a plugin, a quick and dirty method of making this look a little better is the following.

In VS: Tools > Options > Text Editor > File Extension



Add .mm for the extension and select the editor c++. Restart VS and voila, slightly better objective c in VS.


Question and comments are welcome.