Getting and Installing Xcode - Xcode 4 - page 39

For information about creating applications that can run on legacy versions of iOS and OS X, see Chapter 10.
After you have selected a destination folder, the rest of the installation process is automatic. It can take from half
an hour to two hours to install Xcode, depending on the speed of your Mac and its hard disks. You can leave
your Mac unattended or continue working on something else. If you have to install Xcode, update iTunes, and
change the firmware in one or more devices, the complete process can take up to half a day. If you also need to
update OS X, it takes even longer.
CAUTION
Close Xcode and iTunes before you install a new version. The installer pauses if Xcode or iTunes are running.
Creating and organizing project folders
After installing Xcode, you can create supporting folders for your projects. Do not save your projects inside a
/Developer folder. This is critically important. When you update Xcode, the contents of /Developer can be over-
written without notice. For similar reasons, don't install extra helper applications inside /Developer.
If you have installed Xcode into a separate partition, you can keep a project folder elsewhere on the partition.
The exact location or name of your projects folder is arbitrary, but it's useful to choose a location that is only a
few navigation clicks away from /Developer.
Figure 2.12 shows one possible folder workspace for Xcode and associated project folders. It's useful to have a
scratch folder for quick trials and experiments, and a production folder for commercial projects. You may also
want to have further separate folders for Apple sample code, template examples, downloaded code, shared or
collaborative projects, and so on. Try to keep the main production folder dedicated solely to production code,
which includes your own applications and any spin-off frameworks you create. The /Provisioning folder shown
here stores certificates and downloaded provisioning profiles used in iOS development. It's good practice to
store these in a separate folder to make them easy to find and to avoid misplacing them.
TIP
Prefixing project folders with a plus sign (+) lists them alphabetically in a separate order from the tool and support
folders.
FIGURE 2.12
One possible /Developer folder layout is shown here. +Projects hold test and experiments and +Store hold code
used in App Store projects.