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Comment by gawker | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful indeed. I'm trying my hands at iOS development and am wondering how do you build the UI for the chat screen? I'm struggling with doing it in a View-Based tableView.

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We do it with a lot of custom code that responds to keyboard events, input text changes, etc. The underlying timeline is mostly UIViewController based but also does a lot of listening and responding to events all around it. We did try to use some of what is provided (inputAccessoryView for example) but ended up just going with a floating UIView for text input that keeps getting realigned as things happen.

Thanks. Great job btw. I was thinking of going that route but I was concerned that it might get a little heavy memory-wise having tons of views for the text. I couldn't get resizeable view cells to work for UITableView.

Do you guys use the interface builder or is this all programmatic (the initial view setup, not the updates).

All the cool stuff is fully programmatic. I think right now it's just the onboarding screens that are still using interface builder - they're simple and mostly remain static.

One lesson though: do not use interface builder for table view cells, just don't. Cell reuse is tricky to get right as is and you should take the time upfront to make it all work programmatically.

Exactly, there is just generally no need for it. It can be ok for prototyping because of the easy autolayout flags but at the end it just made sense to do the cells programmatically.

Sweet, thanks for the advice. I assume you mean don't have an IB file for your UITableViewCell subclass?

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