Xcode does not impose any structure to your source code tree. This is both cool and useful to quickly throw a couple of lines for a prototype, but in my experience, this approach does not scale. More often than not, without any hygiene, your project can become a mess. Just using Xcode defaults, after a while your resources will sit beside your .xcodeproj file, all the project classes will be thrown together in the Classes folder, and if you have a relatively large project, this approach makes finding individual files painful.

Of course, Xcode provides “Groups” to organize your source code, but the idea is to be able to quickly identify the different kind of files that make up your Xcode project, either for Mac or for the iPhone, without having to open the Xcode project file. This means having both a folder structure, and an internal source code file structure. All of this will help you maintain your project in the future, which means cheaper costs, and less time spent looking for bugs.

All of this is also particularly useful when browsing projects via Google Code, Github or any other kind of file view of source code repositories. If your code is organized in a nice folder structure, it is easier to explore than if all the files sit in the same folder.

In this post I will enumerate some best practices that I use in all of my projects. Continue reading →