Xcode 4 completely changed the (project) template system. There's a lot more you can do now, but it comes at a price. Take a look in the TemplateInfo.plist files scattered around your /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/Xcode/Templates/Project Templates/Application
folder and you'll quickly lose the perspective. The new setup is very hard to modify, even harder to re-create. The writer of boreal-kiss.net has a real good post about the new structure.
One of the things he mentions struck me because I had the same thought while connecting the dots of the extensive use of inheritance in XML:
In fact it seems Apple creates them not by coding but by automatic generation tools.
My question is: Does someone know of such a tool? Is there a hidden helper utility in Xcode? Is it a download somewhere? Or has someone maybe created a tool like this to generate those TemplateInfo.plist XMLs?
It's a stretch, I know, but doing all those files by hand is a project of it's own, a hassle one shouldn't have to worry this hard about in a modern IDE.
UPDATE: While you can code the template files by hand, you can't rely on the templates you create to survive API changes by Apple with new releases of Xcode. I eventually wrote my own system for templating projects, by way of copying existing projects into new ones. This is done within a proprietary set of scripting instructions and a command line RubyGem called klipp
. See: https://rubygems.org/gems/klipp