DevJuice: Can I move Xcode off my main drive?

Dear Dev Juice,

Now that Xcode 4.3 is supposed to live in /Applications, can I move it off my main drive? I used to have it on my secondary, because I have a fast SSD as my primary.

Also, where are all the files located, like the simulator?

John

Dear John,

At over 3 GB, the new Xcode distro is big, but are you sure you really want to mess with the App Store management, which depends on apps residing in /Applications?

We gave offloading a try, moving Xcode onto an external USB disk and symbolically linking it into /Applications. It seemed to run fine and we had no problem creating, compiling and archiving apps. Not sure if this is a super-great idea, though, especially when upgrades come down the line.

Our wild guess is that at any upgrade, App Store could overwrite the symbolic link and you'll have to manually move it off the drive again.

As for the "files," I assume you're talking about the executables like iPhone Simulator.app (which can be found in /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents in the Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications/ subfolder) rather than the data files that are stored in /Users/youraccount/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator.

In /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications, you'll find some of your old favorites like Icon Composer and FileMerge. Utilities like git, gdb, and nm are now in the Contents Developer/usr/bin subfolder. Older items such as RezWack and SetFile have moved into the Developer/Tools subfolder.

Happy Developing!