I know apple internally uses this tool but are there alternatives out there that just kick but? I know Text Mate is good and its way powerful if you know what your doing, but its a steep learning curve - at least for me. Xcode IDE is buggy and does not organize a project like VC - which is what I've been using for years. So any tips on a package I could look into?

As far as alternatives to visual studio (I guess the word alternative is a misnomer on non-Windows platforms), I happen to like Sun C++ Studio 12 and Eclipse for c/c++ development.

Sun Studio is my favorite non visual studio IDE although for some reason it hasn't really caught on.. but the reasons I like it are because it has the best intellisense and function completion out of the available IDE's on *nix platforms. It also has an interface that is very intuitive to someone used to visual studio.

Well for Objective C, I know there are a lot of other IDE out there that basically does what VC does. Perhaps I could find an Eclipse plugin - that would be cool.