Xcode is in parts good to great, and in parts terrible. One thing that’s terrible is all the documentation that I can lay my hands on. It seems to be aimed at people who work on small projects.

This is not a replacement, it’s just some things I was searching while I was trying to figure things out on my own. This is stuff that people have had to figure out, e.g. the Premake and CMake authors doing Xcode project generation.

Managing Xcode

Xcode Groups vs. Folder References

By the way, I think CocoaPods is approaching it from the wrong direction, it’s maintaining a foreign build system inside Xcode. I think. I should really actually use CocoaPods before I condemn it :)

venmo/synx is an interesting project that reorganizes the files on disk to match the order declared in the Xcode project. This is presumably because people find it easier to organize the Xcode project first?

XCode 4.2 and Using a Static Library Causing Problems. I read things like this and I think someone must have gone horribly wrong somewhere.

Xcode Project File Format. Some notes from the Monobjc bridge project on the Xcode project file format.

A brief look at the Xcode project format, and More on the Xcode project format and Xcode project object UUIDs. A slightly more in depth explanation and spelunking.

[Cmake] Re: CMake Apple XCode support?. A thread from 2004 that apparently predated CMake’s ability to create Xcode projects.

PBTOMAKE – Xcode to Unix. Another 2004 era Xcode project format tool.

CocoaPods Under The Hood. Also see How does CocoaPods work. And then see The problem with Cocoapods.

Install a Google SDK using CocoaPods.

0xced/xcproj. Command line tool for manipulating Xcode project files.

XCode project file merges (or not) & Cocoapods. One technique to mergeable .xcodeproj files is to keep internal sections sorted.