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Comment by duozerk | Hacker News Reader

I occasionally have to work on (fairly complex) Android apps and I only use emacs and make for edition, compilation and deployment - the makefile calls the SDK CLI toolchain to compile and deploy (ant & ndk-build for the native side). There's really no reason to use Eclipse IMHO - it's just an horrible mess of an IDE that hinders more than it helps.

For iOS, however, it seems you're indeed kinda screwed - you have to go through Xcode and the atrocious storyboards stuff.

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You can write iOS apps without using storyboards or xib files. That's how Apple does it.

The main benefit is that you end-up with no merge conflicts in semi-opaque files.

Where did you hear that Apple writes iOS apps without xibs or storyboards? I'm in the same camp myself (I think xibs are a ticking timebomb), and having some supporting evidence showing Apple itself does the same would make my argument much stronger.

Ex Apple employees on the 'Edge Cases Podcast' - xib files were extremely brittle initially. Merging conflicts would be impossible to handle without dedicated tooling.

Really ? heard from a colleague that this will get you a likely refusal during the apple store validation process when deploying your app (said they were looking for storyboard files for each and every screen or something). Must have been wrong :-)

Though I think you're still stuck with xcode ? can you use a CLI toolchain (directly calling clang and so on) to compile, build and sign an IPA ? from the little I've seen of Xcode, it sucks (a lot): random crashes, GUI & behaviour inconsistencies, bad file management, etc...

Xcode still has some weird bits, but it's greatly improved lately. I well remember cursing the crashing multiple times a day. There are some wonderful additions to it I wish Apple included by default that NSHipster covered recently.

FWIW, Apple has never required storyboard. You can do everything in code if you -really- want to do it that way, no problem. Personally, I like offloading a lot of the visual stuff to storyboard/xibs unless you start getting crazy with custom animations and so forth.

definitely wrong, i've submitted > 10 apps and updates without a single storyboard

There is a third party IDE: AppCode by jetbrains which does most of what you need (and apparently lots of things better than Xcode) but i've never used it for any long periods

Xcode gets a bad rap, but i use it every day and can't remember the last time the current version crashed or did something strange, maybe i'm just used to it by now though

Thanks !

Yes! In iOS world you are screwed. You can decide to avoid iOS though. ;)

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