Your First iOS App – 100% Programmatically
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Your First iOS App – 100% Programmatically
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Re: Your First iOS App – 100% Programmatically
#2So, a word of advice to new folks trying out iOS land:
Interface Builder is most emphatically your friend. The compile/debug cycle in iOS is sufficiently lengthy that laying out views programmatically gets very tedious very fast.
Besides realtime previewing of exactly how your view is going to look, IB also helps you understand how your layout is affected by rotations to landscape and differences in view height between device classes (3GS/4/4S vs 5).
Nibs make it easy to tweak and adjust – and even to throw away and start fresh.
Most importantly, though – every nib you use is code you do not have to maintain. If a UI object has some part of its API deprecated, your nibs don't care. They're automatically up-to-date.
Can you do every fancy thing you'd like with nibs? Certainly not. But you can do the basic braindead layouts of labels and buttons there, and you're much likelier to get what you want the first time. There's enough tedious code to wrangle in iOS as it is – don't create more for yourself by rejecting a mature, useful tool.
edit: For clarity, though, by all means, enjoy this solid tutorial so you understand how to get your hands dirty when necessary. Just don't fear the IB.
Re: Your First iOS App – 100% Programmatically
#3So, a word of advice to new folks trying out iOS land: Interface Builder is most emphatically your friend. The compile/debug cycle in iOS is sufficiently lengthy that laying out views programmatically gets very tedious very fast. Besides realtime previewing of exactly how your view is going to look , IB also helps you understand how your layout is affected by rotations to landscape and differences in view height betw…
I agree with pretty much everything you say (especially now Apple will be pushing auto-layout for newcomers to the platform), but the one thing that's really bothered me with the "Your First iOS App" tutorial is that as some point it switched from NIBs over to a full Storyboard.
And Storyboards are certainly in principle a cool idea, but I've never seen a production app that has actually used them (please do correct me if you're reading this and use them in your own shipping app). As far as I know, Apple aren't dog-fooding them in their own apps either. I'm not sure of the benefits of introducing them as pretty much the first thing out of the gate. But I'm prepared to be wrong!
Re: Your First iOS App – 100% Programmatically
#4I made a fake account to ask this question b/c I'm too ashamed not to know this:
Is there an equivalent Visual Basic-style editor for making iOS apps? You just place the button, double click on it, add functionality, drop in elements and you're off the races?
Just looking at this tutorial, it is astonishing how much knowledge you need to have to get up & running and create something so simple like a HelloWorld example (I've heard it is a herculean effort to do something really exotic like make text both bold and underlined in label on say a title screen)
Can somebody who knows their stuff please disabuse me of my ignorance/foolishness?
Re: Your First iOS App – 100% Programmatically
#5So, a word of advice to new folks trying out iOS land: Interface Builder is most emphatically your friend. The compile/debug cycle in iOS is sufficiently lengthy that laying out views programmatically gets very tedious very fast. Besides realtime previewing of exactly how your view is going to look , IB also helps you understand how your layout is affected by rotations to landscape and differences in view height betw…
I agree with pretty much everything you say (especially now Apple will be pushing auto-layout for newcomers to the platform), but the one thing that's really bothered me with the "Your First iOS App" tutorial is that as some point it switched from NIBs over to a full Storyboard. And Storyboards are certainly in principle a cool idea, but I've never seen a production app that has actually used them (please do correct…
Yeah, Storyboards are still in their awkward phase. That's totally fair. And I don't yet trust them for running view navigation.
But you know what they're awesome for? Static table views.
If you want to build a grouped table view as login view, settings panel or the like, Storyboards are perfect.
I'm also a big fan of Storyboards for prototyping. You can get to a pretty good fidelity demo of your app's information architecture, and often you can re-use what you built when it's time to code the app for real.
(Though I often cut the Storyboard content out and paste it into a nib.)
Re: Your First iOS App – 100% Programmatically
#6When the iPhone SDK came out, this was what you got. And this was how the first Apple tutorials were. Back then, there was no Interface Builder for iOS. All the views had to be laid out by hand. That's how I wrote my first iOS app. Man, that was tedious. I'm happy there's interface builder now. Though a word of advice: the ugly XML/plist format of interface builder files makes tracking changes or merging very, very difficult.
Re: Your First iOS App – 100% Programmatically
#7I made a fake account to ask this question b/c I'm too ashamed not to know this: Is there an equivalent Visual Basic-style editor for making iOS apps? You just place the button, double click on it, add functionality, drop in elements and you're off the races? Just looking at this tutorial, it is astonishing how much knowledge you need to have to get up & running and create something so simple like a HelloWorld exampl…
Yes, there is Interface Builder in Xcode.
Re: Your First iOS App – 100% Programmatically
#8[deleted]
Re: Your First iOS App – 100% Programmatically
#9I made a fake account to ask this question b/c I'm too ashamed not to know this: Is there an equivalent Visual Basic-style editor for making iOS apps? You just place the button, double click on it, add functionality, drop in elements and you're off the races? Just looking at this tutorial, it is astonishing how much knowledge you need to have to get up & running and create something so simple like a HelloWorld exampl…
I never actually used VB so maybe I'm talking out of my ass but...
Storyboards sound like an attempt to do what you're describing. You can throw together a bunch of views without writing any code at all, then string them together so that a tap on a given button or cell pushes one view to the next.
This is also pretty useful for prototyping.
Re: Your First iOS App – 100% Programmatically
#10I made a fake account to ask this question b/c I'm too ashamed not to know this: Is there an equivalent Visual Basic-style editor for making iOS apps? You just place the button, double click on it, add functionality, drop in elements and you're off the races? Just looking at this tutorial, it is astonishing how much knowledge you need to have to get up & running and create something so simple like a HelloWorld exampl…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcode
XCode has a drag and drop interface builder built in for iOS.