Inessential: The part of Xcode 4 that tires me out.

"The only thing worse than managing multiple windows is managing multiple panes."

As usual, Brent nails it.

I try out every new release of Xcode 4 that comes out, and it is getting better, but XC4 still feels so hostile to having multiple windows open that I find myself going back to Xcode 3. There are fiddly ways to make it open up new windows using Behaviors in the prefs, giving certain tabs names, etc… But even with that it feels wrong.

And I really miss having Interface Builder as a separate application. What ever happened to the philosophy of "small sharp tools"?

I've been asked a couple of times how to get Xcode 3 up and running on 10.7. Dustin Norman has a nice walkthrough on installing Xcode 3.2.6 on Lion.

If you'd like to use Xcode 3 to target 10.7, you can do this as well. Install the latest version of Xcode 4 into /Xcode4 and copy the MacOSX10.7.sdk from there into /Xcode3/SDKs/. It works great. You can even use ARC from Xcode 3 by adding a user defined build setting (CC = /Xcode4/usr/bin/clang) and then add -fobjc-arc to your build flags (or per file).