I do like doing iOS development, but I have always found the interface for doing so to be a little cumbersome and long winded. First you write your code in Xcode and then design your interfaces in Interface Builder - when writing PHP I wouldn't use two apps to split out parts of the MVC like that; I'd just use Textwrangler or other such text editor. This is why it's always seemed odd that Apple would split development of an application out into different applications.
Apple have released a preview (now onto it's second iteration) of Xcode 4 - a brand new interface for Cocoa development that seeks to unify them into a single application and have advertised it as being intelligent enough to help you write better code.
The Xcode IDE understands your project’s every detail, identifies mistakes in both syntax and logic, and will even fix your code for you. Quite simply, Xcode 4 will help you write better code.
Whilst code checking and auto-suggesting fixes is an interesting topic (maybe one for another article) what interests me (in addition to the unification of the two applications) is that they've worked on clearing up a lot of clutter so there is now jump navigation and small icons for switching between the different views. It might not sound like much but I often find when coding that the more space you have to read through code, the better. It's also quite handy that you can now drag and drop controls onto code to wire them up to use that function or variable.
With the new Xcode Assistant, the two-pane editor layout in Xcode 4 becomes dramatically more powerful. When you turn on Assistant, the IDE will anticipate which other files you need to see, as you work.
The purpose of such a feature is that it will show you the code for headers if you're working on implementing the class, or show you the parent class definition if you're working in a class that inherits from it. Simple, but a great idea. They've also tightly integrated version control with Xcode 4 so that you can easily switch between and view differences between versions of the code. There are some seriously basic and/or ugly diff tools out there (such as UltraCompare on the PC) and this isn't one of them - it is actually more powerful than the code comparison in Text Wrangler and looks a lot prettier too.
I actually can't wait for Xcode 4 to reach the final release.
