iOS Could've built an app maker by hand.

[moonman239]

The storyboard file is an organized XML file. If an app is made up mostly of table views and controllers (e.g, little to no code), the app could theoretically be built using a hand-made AppleScript. The idea is that one could create a file that tells the script how the app is to be organized. Then that person could run the script, give it both that file and the storyboard file, then let it do some magic.

Just about all the UI code is in the storyboard file. For example, examining my storyboard file, I found that a table view cell that was linked to another view had a segue tag that had its destination ID set to the exact ID of the destination view.

 

[PhoneyDeveloper]

The philosophy behind Cocoa has always been that less code is better and the code that you don't write has no bugs in it. Storyboards are the next stage in evolution of nibs. Cocoa has always been a deep framework in that sense.

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

The philosophy behind Cocoa has always been that less code is better and the code that you don't write has no bugs in it. Storyboards are the next stage in evolution of nibs. Cocoa has always been a deep framework in that sense.

A missing or incorrect connection or attribute in a nib or storyboard is equivalent to a bug in code... furthermore, it seems to me that they can be much more difficult to find than bugs in code... although the hardest one I ever had pertained to Cocoa bindings, which haven't been ported to iOS yet for better or worse...

 

[PhoneyDeveloper]

I didn't say it was perfect. The lack of code is sometimes great and sometimes terrible. Developers are coders. Without code it can be difficult to debug problems. There's no place to put comments. The errors tend to be found at runtime and can be obscure or difficult to find.

There are some iOS coders that never use nibs or storyboards. I would say that there are no MacOS X coders that never use nibs or storyboards. Some people never grok how nibs work without seeing the code.

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

I didn't say it was perfect. The lack of code is sometimes great and sometimes terrible. Developers are coders. Without code it can be difficult to debug problems. There's no place to put comments. The errors tend to be found at runtime and can be obscure or difficult to find.

Exactly! That's a huge feature missing from the UI and Core Data editors! I'd love it if there was some way to pin comments to Core Data in particular... to explain the purpose that a certain entity has, for example... they can represent pretty abstract things that can't be explained within any name of reasonable length...

 

[dejo]

If an app is made up mostly of table views and controllers (e.g, little to no code)...

Such an app would probably be pretty simplistic and not really provide much in the way of value.

...the app could theoretically be built using a hand-made AppleScript.

And what advantage would that approach provide over the visually-based Interface Builder portion of Xcode?