Hacker News Reader

Interface Builder is superb once you get the hang of it.

It does a great job of getting you from zero to an app, but it breaks down terribly once you try to do anything custom with it. The fact that it hides code from the developer drives me nuts.

Well it depends what you mean by custom. I create custom views all the time and its even better now we can render them 'live' in IB:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/recipes/xcode_help-I...

Ooh I forgot about that feature. It does at least answer my big problem with IB: you execute code you didn't write and can't read. I'll have to give live rendering another look.

I won't start a religious war here, but IB is awesome in demos and less awesome in real world. Versioning alone is enough to make you go crazy (especially back in the .nib days!).

I understand both sides of the argument - it took me considerable time to wrap me head around IB and for the longest time I just assumed I simply wouldn't "get it".

Interested to how you do versioning on UI with or without IB though. Personally I just maintain branches until an agreed upon design is in place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com