How to Download Old Versions of Xcode

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 04:21:19 +0000

Whyyy would I need an old version of Xcode?

Valid question – it’s not often you’ll need one. Two reasons off the top of my head though:

1) To compare with your previous experience

Perhaps you’re just wanting to see what things “used to be like”.

Maybe you’re struggling with the infamous “this code worked before…now it doesn’t…what changed?” and you just want to build your project with a prior version of Xcode in order to rule it out as the culprit.

Grabbing an older version of Xcode could help you here.

2) To upgrade a very old project to newer versions of Swift

I hit this one the other day. I needed to update the exercise files for my Core Data Fundamentals with Swift course on Pluralsight.

I opened the project in Xcode 12 and this popped up:

Xcode 10.1??? That was a while ago. 😅

How to download

Regardless of your reason, the good news is that you can download old versions of Xcode (and a lot of other tools) from the Apple Developer Center.

The link is a bit hidden though, so I’ll leave it here for you as an easy-to-find breadcrumb:

Resources

https://developer.apple.com/download/more/

You’ll need to sign in to your Apple Developer account, but once you’re in, you’ll have access to lots of old stuff.

Every version of Xcode is available – all the way back to version 1.0, released in 2003.

You’ll also find prior versions of macOS, old versions of the command line tools, prior betas and release candidates of Xcode and macOS, and more.

How cool is that?

New Delights With Xcode 11

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 04:21:19 +0000

Capabilities Search

In your project settings, you can search for capabilities you want to add (instead of scrolling down the list and turning things “on” or “off”).

Editor Quick Actions

Holding the command key down while mousing over and clicking on various levels of your code presents a quick action pop-out. Handy! Xcode 10 had some of these as well, but Xcode 11 adds additional actions in additional areas.

Jump to Code from Minimap

The minimap in and of itself is nice, but I found the “jump to code” features smart and convenient.

Marks in the Minimap

Have you noticed that // Mark: produces “header”-like text in the minimap?

// Mark: also produces a thin line break in your code - I think it definitely helps spot divisions in your code and could help find what you want a little quicker.

History Inspector (source control history)

There’s a little source control icon in the Inspectors pane that lets you quickly see commit history and perform quick actions.

Tooltip From Minimap

If you move your mouse over the minimap, Xcode will display little tooltips out to the left that correspond to major sections of your code, such as the class/struct declaration, properties, and functions.

Xcode on Andrew Bancroft