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copied!<p>There really is no alternative IDE on OS X for writing native applications. Some dislike the Xcode built-in editor, however. One very popular alternative is <a href="http://macromates.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">TextMate</a> (non-free, but well worth the ~$50). Xcode can be configured to use your editor of choice for editing text files. Free alternatives include <a href="http://aquamacs.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Emacs</a> and <a href="http://macvim.org/OSX/index.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Vim</a> ports for OS X.</p> <p>You can, of course, use the gcc toolchain without Xcode (e.g. using one of the Unix-style build systems such as Make). You can also use <code>xcodebuild</code> at the terminal command line to build an Xcode project without using the Xcode GUI at all (you'd be hard-pressed to configure and manage the project without the GUI, however). Combining these two, one could cobble together an IDE from e.g <a href="http://eclipse.org/downloads/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Eclipse</a> to build an OS X app. iPhone would be harder since Xcode handles certificate signing etc. for you, but still possible. You would loose all of the nice Objective-C completion and documentation integration you get from Xcode, of course.</p> <p>So, in summary, Xcode is pretty much the only game in town. It will undoubtedly take a while to get used to coming from VS. In particular, code generation is almost unheard of in the Cocoa world. When you feel yourself searching for those kind of tools, train yourself to try a different approach. Objective-C's late-binding combined with the power of NIB/XIB (bundles produced in Interface Builder that describe the UI of an app; XIB is a newer, version-control-friendly XML-based format that is automatically compiled into a NIB, the old-style format from NextStep days) makes code generation unnecessary.</p> <p>For non-Cocoa/iPhone development, the ecosystem is naturally larger. Nokia has their own <a href="http://www.qtsoftware.com/products/developer-tools" rel="nofollow noreferrer">IDE</a> for the Qt toolkit which can be used to write OS X (but not iPhone) apps. <a href="http://eclipse.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Eclipse</a> can be used to write Java apps using any of the Java toolkits (including SWT and the Qt-Java framework, QtJambi).</p> <p>For pure Windows-developer familiarity, there's also <a href="http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:OSX" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Mono</a> which runs on OS X. <a href="http://monodevelop.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MonoDevelop</a> may run on OS X, but I'm not sure.</p>

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