"I guess this is a matter of opinion. Every time I am forced (read: paid) to use Xcode for some project, not only do I dislike the fact that I have to dig out my macbook because Apple's tools don't work on any other platform, but I find actually using them painful."
I think it all depends on what you compare XCode with, and what kind of applications you are developing.
Personally, I find all IDE's painful to use, compared to just editing with gvim and building/testing using command-line tools. The fundamental problem with IDE's is that they are supposed to integrate a complete development workflow, which is never the same workflow you are used to, and which adds layers of complexity that are usually completely unnecessary if you write your own build & test scripts, customized for each project.
That said, of all the IDE's I've used over time, XCode is easily the best. There has been a regression from XCode 3 to XCode 4 in some ways, but it's getting better. I'd say the quality of the total XCode package is on par with Visual Studio, which is saying a lot. Environments such as Netbeans or Eclipse don't even come close to XCode 4 in terms of user friendlyness, speed, and integration.
If it were even remotely possible, I'd develop iOS and OS X applications using just gvim and command-line tools, but it simply isn't possible to get all the UI work, storyboarding, CoreData model creation, etc. done without something like XCode.
Personally, I think it's very hard to maintain that XCode is not a great tool for the problems it is supposed to solve, especially if Apple gets around to fixing all the (minor) regressions they introduced with XCode 4.
I think it all depends on what you compare XCode with, and what kind of applications you are developing.
Personally, I find all IDE's painful to use, compared to just editing with gvim and building/testing using command-line tools. The fundamental problem with IDE's is that they are supposed to integrate a complete development workflow, which is never the same workflow you are used to, and which adds layers of complexity that are usually completely unnecessary if you write your own build & test scripts, customized for each project.
That said, of all the IDE's I've used over time, XCode is easily the best. There has been a regression from XCode 3 to XCode 4 in some ways, but it's getting better. I'd say the quality of the total XCode package is on par with Visual Studio, which is saying a lot. Environments such as Netbeans or Eclipse don't even come close to XCode 4 in terms of user friendlyness, speed, and integration.
If it were even remotely possible, I'd develop iOS and OS X applications using just gvim and command-line tools, but it simply isn't possible to get all the UI work, storyboarding, CoreData model creation, etc. done without something like XCode.
Personally, I think it's very hard to maintain that XCode is not a great tool for the problems it is supposed to solve, especially if Apple gets around to fixing all the (minor) regressions they introduced with XCode 4.