So about 3 months ago I wrote a post about how our development tools often waste a lot of our often delaying productivity. Twenty years ago this would have been unacceptable. But these days with “free” tools and budget cuts for them we can often spend more time with our tools getting them to work than we should.
When I left off I was waiting for Xcode 12.1 to install. Well it installed and I tested the matter at hand and didn’t quite see the problem the user was reporting. So closed up things and here I am today trying to do a release version of the app with some additional fixes that Android and Windows also got. So then Xamarin tells me that Visual Studio 2019 won’t work with Xcode 11.5. Hmm, I swear I installed 12.1. Apparently not but it was running so Xamarin used it three months ago.
So this afternoon I finding out how to remove 11.5 and make 12.1 the default Xcode. Guess I’m also going to need a Mac cheat sheet because I’m not on it every day and often not every month either. Anyway I got Xcode 11.5 removed by dragging it’s icon out of the Applications folder into the trash bin. Then you have to empty the trash (the article seemed to neglect that). Next I needed to drag the Xcode 12.1 into Applications. Well for some reason it is hard to drag it there and it installed to the desktop. Thing is this takes forever and now I’m waiting for it to finish the “drag” to the Applications folder. What a funky way of doing things!
Maybe there is a way to cancel such “drags” but I haven’t found it yet. Now I’m not sure if the fact that I was too cheap to buy an external SSD for more memory and bought a 500GB HDD instead but it was all of $36. SSD was a lot more and users complained it ran hot (the HDD doesn’t). And then once everything is copacetic the slowness doesn’t effect builds much.
I put the iOS builds last because they get scrutinized more by Apple than Android or Windows. Google does little of that with an Android submission to Google Play and Microsoft maybe a little more though some of that testing is done on the developer’s machine. At least if I put the iOS submissions last I can include anything overlooked errors that the Android and Windows users find.