Writing a Big App in Swift

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31 pointsmattiemass3 comments

> Switching to Auto Layout for almost all layout needs, with a single Storyboard for both iPad and iPhone.

I'm surprised that worked out for him, given what I've heard about Storyboards, which is that they're fine for really trivial UIs but don't scale well at all for any workflow that's even slightly complex. But that was like 2014. Maybe things have changed since then?

I think it's fair to say storyboards haven't improved much since then, although it's a fairly divisive topic.

Personally I still very much fall on the side of not using storyboards for non-trivial UI.

One thing that changed is storyboards became more modular, and you can load them programmatically just like .xib files. So you can break apart UI into multiple storyboards.

Which is good, because some features only work inside storyboards. For example, the Interface Builder component of Xcode cannot lay out a "static" UITableView (one whose content and subviews are set at design time) unless it's inside a storyboard. No idea why.

I used to avoid storyboards as much as possible, but things like that made me decide it's too much trouble to fight The Man, so now I just usually use them like he wants me to.

I think it's fair to say that storyboards have gotten better, but they still suck.

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