The more mobile development I do the more I am finding you are just expected to know things magically. There are very few help screens, tips of the day or on screen tutorials. There are so many potential gestures in any app that you need to magically discover. What can we do to make this situation better?
A lot of apps allow swipes to perform an action. Swipe left to call, swipe right to text. Long presses may do something or bring up a menu. Some actions are instant and others prompt you but you are never really sure what will happen. Delete should prompt. Add a new item most likely does not need to unless it will cost money i.e. send a message or use your data plan or will take a long time to perform.
Some will answer the mobile device is so small and we all want to save on code size and people never use help or only use it once so skip it. The original apps were very small and had few features so that worked. News apps have a ton of features. We basically have computers in our pockets and we do a lot of work on them.
Do we need a standard "Cool Features" button showing quick help? Maybe it should show a standardized overlay on the screen to explain the swipes and long presses so people can get more out of our apps.
The other side of this is developer tools. They have a boat load of features too and a lot of their power is there but hidden from the coder. I know Xcode drives me crazy with its lack of right mouse button menus. I expect to be able to perform most actions a context sensitive menu. In general the menus are very terse. Want to add a view controller to a story board? Right click on the story board and you get zooming only options. You have to know to drag a view controller for the Utilities panel. But first the Utilities panel has to be visible. That is the only way to perform this operation. That is not friendly.
Speaking of the Utilities panel it has 6 tabs on it and I seem never to go to the correct one to do what I need. Do do nearly anything you shift between 2 or 3 of the tabs. Somehow I would like the most common settings on a single tab that I could define.
Right click on a segue control and you get zoom options but nothing associated to the segue. Click on the Scene Name in the left hand panel and nothing at all happens. I excepted the editor to scroll to that Scene. You have to click on a view of the scene for that to happen. Oh and it changes your zoom factor when you do that. Just scroll there! If I was zoomed out I want to stay zoomed out!
Is the layout of your windows wrong? Can you right click on something and fix it? No, you have to go to View -> Assistant Editor and pick the layout you want. I did not even know the window I was looking at was called Assistant Editor as nothing on screen indicates that. You can mouse hover over the toolbar button to find that out. Those same buttons are inconsistent. The first three toggle between modes of a view and only one can be pressed at any time. The next three toggle the visibility of views and any or none of them can be pressed but the two sets visually they look identical.
Highlight a word in the editor and hit Cmd+F most editors will automatically put the highlighted word in the search box but not Xcode. I get to copy / paste it up there. Heck I can highlight a word in Eclipse and just hit Ctrl+K to find the next occurrence skipping the Find prompt altogether.
Add files to a project and guess what? They are not flagged as needed to be added to version control. Why? Right click on them to add them and that menu is not there. I have to fire up SourceTree to add them to GIT for this to work. Xcode version control integration is crappy at best.
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