Every Cocoa developer has their own preferred tools for writing code, looking up documentation, creating icons and preparing apps for the App Store. Here are some of our present favorites:
Xcode (of course). A few warts aside, it’s an incredible IDE. We also love Swift.
AppCode: A fine adjunct to Xcode that adds extensive refactoring and code quality checks, as well as very intelligent code intentions.
Accessorizer: Generates code for properties, initializers, accessors, archiving/dearchiving, Core Data, KVO and much, much more.
Dash: A better documentation browser than the one built into Xcode, it also includes documentation sets for Cocoa-related languages such as SQLite, OpenGL and Ruby.
PaintCode: Translates vector graphics into pure Cocoa code to reduce program size.
ClassMaker: Generates the CoreData boilerplate code for a given SQLite database.
Slender: Pares down Xcode projects by removing unnecessary assets.
Prepo: Icon preparation tool.
RubyMine: A Ruby IDE from the same folks that make AppCode.
SQLEditor: A visual database design tool.
A tool that has piqued our interest, but we are not yet using is:
RubyMotion: It combines what we love about Cocoa with what we love about Ruby. I only wish it could integrate Interface Builder better.