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Comment by objclxt | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.)

Half the stuff on my storyboards aren't even connected. I treat it like a big nib file. It's excellent for having everything displayed in front of you, in one place, and you can add segues and other storyboard magic as needed.

How would you know if a production app was using Storyboards? I just submitted my first "Storyboard App" . It was a little uncomfortable for me seeing as I have gotten used to using NIBs, but I did it because I assumed Apple was moving away from NIBs.. I wonder how other people who use Storyboards do it..I pretty much had to sit at a desk with my MBP connected to external monitors anytime I wanted to do any work, just because the Storyboard required a lot of screen space.

> How would you know if a production app was using Storyboards?

Because just like NIBs, Storyboards exist as part of an app's resource bundle, which is easily viewable. It is usually fairly straightforward to examine an IPA from the store and determine whether it's using NIBs and the like.

I think the most likely explanation is that the grandparent commenter was referring to their own experience with projects they've worked on.

> And Storyboards are certainly in principle a cool idea, but I've never seen a production app that has actually used them

Fly Delta app uses them all over the place (first-hand experience) - they're fantastic for static cell table views. Admittedly, merging them can be a HUGE pain, though.

> As far as I know, Apple aren't dog-fooding them in their own apps either.

From what I've heard from an Apple engineer, Apple doesn't dog-food a lot of this stuff because the tools either don't exist yet by the time they need to ship or aren't stable. A lot (most?) of their apps end up being done programatically.

I'm writing a fairly complex iOS app, and I opted in for storyboards in it. It doesn't handle 100% of navigation, because I only was invited to work on the app at some point and I didn't feel to rewrite the whole thing, but I use it for a substantial part of UI. It gets a while to get used to, but then you have this very cool overview of this whole part of the app. Some static parts are done 100% in IB (like a menu with grouped-style UITableView, utilizing static cells), others only use placeholders which are filled in code. But it works, and it works pretty well.

Our app has ~15 view controllers laid out in a single storyboard, and we haven't had any issues with them. We only have one iOS developer, so I don't know if that makes a difference.

We don't really use segues, though, since they seem to add complexity if you want to pass data around between the view controllers.

In case you are not aware, there is UIViewController's `prepareForSegue:sender:` method (http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UIKit/...). In short you figure out which segue was being prepared (segue.identifier) and setup the destination view controller (segue.destinationViewController) as needed.

I've got a production app I switched from nibs to storyboards. It's got a storyboard for the iPhone and a separate storyboard for the iPad. 58 views on each. I'm using segues for pretty much all navigation. It's working amazingly well for me.

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