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Comment by andrewroycarter | Hacker News Reader

I'm so tired of all the IB hate. IB is a tool, and it should be used when appropriate. Sure you can't do everything in it, but for 80% of even "complex" views, things can be done significantly faster in IB. Doing all UI creation and layout isn't faster and more "hardcore", it's ignoring a tool that has been around longer than OS X and iOS that was literally made for the job! Have fun maintaining that mess of UI layout code!

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Isn't it fair to hate it just due to the clunky interface?

Many times I find it difficult to select a subview under another subview. Or, when adding a subview, it is too eager to be the subview of a subview. Those are the tip of my list of grievances.

I use it! Sometimes it's simpler and faster to go with IB instead of code, and you are definitely right about maintainability. But I sure wish there was something as convenient that wasn't awful to use. That's actually how I feel about all of Xcode. (Yes, I've tried AppCode, I liked it even less.)

You can select a specific view under others with ctrl-shift-click. I don't know anything to help with its over-eagerness to add subviews, though.

Definitely. And Super Debugger can be used just as well for IB projects too (some things you can't test out with IB, like a corner radius).

And of course, this tool isn't just for UI tweaking. It's for any kind of messages you might want to send to objects. It's an object spelunker.

I'm looking forward to giving this a go at work tomorrow!

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