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I find it strange that something akin to markdown-style syntax sugar is more user-friendly than a visual designer. Do the tools for developing a UI for iOS this

by tomyws 11y ago

I find it strange that something akin to markdown-style syntax sugar is more user-friendly than a visual designer. Do the tools for developing a UI for iOS this way not include a WYSIWYG editor to set things such as contraints?

euyyn 11y ago
I find XCode's UI editor pretty good!
pducks32 11y ago
They do in the interface builder however if you just wanted to use programmatically created views then not really no.
Someone 11y ago
They do, but search and replace, diffing, and copy-paste of multiple elements and their constraints likely (I haven't used Xcode's editor much, certainly not recently) do not work as well as their equivalent in text. And of course, some people find markdown more user-friendly than a visual GUI for more or less the same reasons, so it should not be that surprising to find some people experiment with this. And of course, autolayout has a text-based language of its own (https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AutolayoutPG/VisualFormatLanguage.html https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserEx...)
- schwarrrtz 11y ago
  you can copy elements in interface builder, iirc. you can't copy their constraints, which makes sense because the copied instances necessarily have different constraints. otherwise the copies would just stack on top of each other. in my personal opinion, IB is great for layout of one view or screen, especially with the new IBDesignable and IBInspectable features. doing app navigation in a storyboard is a terrible idea and will lead to a monolithic storyboard file that is very annoying to work with.
  - sachadso 11y ago
    couldn't agree more !
  - cellularmitosis 11y ago
    Was going to say something similar, that IB is great if you are doing one-off screens, but it isn't the best for creating reusable / composable UI elements.
woah 11y ago
Do you also find it strange that WYISWYG website editors are not more widely used?
wrigby 11y ago
I think it's really a question of audience. A textual DSL for visual layout is popular to the HN audience, because most of us are more comfortable writing code and interacting with computers on the command line. While we love having a DSL that we can use our favorite tools on (like diff, grep, ack, etc.), the majority of other folks (read: non-HN users) probably find a WYSIWYG editor much nicer.
bri3d 11y ago
The tools do include that functionality, called Interface Builder or the Storyboard Designer. The editor on its own is fairly nice to use these days, but it outputs obtuse XML and has a propensity to edit parts of the layout XML file that weren't actually modified. This makes source-control level collaboration and especially code review very difficult. To make things worse, for a long time the tooling encouraged putting almost all UI into one giant "Storyboard XML" file, guaranteeing confusion and conflicts. The editor was also quite slow and crashy for years which drove the proliferation of these libraries and the "don't use the storyboard editor" meme accompanying them. It's gotten a lot better in the last ~2 years and I haven't had a crash in heavy day-to-day usage for quite some time. If Apple could improve the XML output format to be easier to review, eliminate the serialization/deserialization weirdnesses, introduce a visual diff-and-merge tool, and improve the performance just a bit more, the Interface Builder would be excellent, but as is, I see why a lot of people don't like using it, especially on big projects with many collaborators.
sachadso 11y ago
Using Interface builder is Great indeed it just has a ton of other issues down the road, this article sums it well : http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/why-i-dont-use-interface-builder http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/why-i-dont-use-interface-build...

by tomyws 11y ago

euyyn 11y ago

I find XCode's UI editor pretty good!

pducks32 11y ago

They do in the interface builder however if you just wanted to use programmatically created views then not really no.

Someone 11y ago

They do, but search and replace, diffing, and copy-paste of multiple elements and their constraints likely (I haven't used Xcode's editor much, certainly not recently) do not work as well as their equivalent in text. And of course, some people find markdown more user-friendly than a visual GUI for more or less the same reasons, so it should not be that surprising to find some people experiment with this. And of course, autolayout has a text-based language of its own (https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AutolayoutPG/VisualFormatLanguage.html https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserEx...)

schwarrrtz 11y ago
you can copy elements in interface builder, iirc. you can't copy their constraints, which makes sense because the copied instances necessarily have different constraints. otherwise the copies would just stack on top of each other. in my personal opinion, IB is great for layout of one view or screen, especially with the new IBDesignable and IBInspectable features. doing app navigation in a storyboard is a terrible idea and will lead to a monolithic storyboard file that is very annoying to work with.
- sachadso 11y ago
  couldn't agree more !
- cellularmitosis 11y ago
  Was going to say something similar, that IB is great if you are doing one-off screens, but it isn't the best for creating reusable / composable UI elements.

woah 11y ago

Do you also find it strange that WYISWYG website editors are not more widely used?

wrigby 11y ago

I think it's really a question of audience. A textual DSL for visual layout is popular to the HN audience, because most of us are more comfortable writing code and interacting with computers on the command line. While we love having a DSL that we can use our favorite tools on (like diff, grep, ack, etc.), the majority of other folks (read: non-HN users) probably find a WYSIWYG editor much nicer.

bri3d 11y ago

The tools do include that functionality, called Interface Builder or the Storyboard Designer. The editor on its own is fairly nice to use these days, but it outputs obtuse XML and has a propensity to edit parts of the layout XML file that weren't actually modified. This makes source-control level collaboration and especially code review very difficult. To make things worse, for a long time the tooling encouraged putting almost all UI into one giant "Storyboard XML" file, guaranteeing confusion and conflicts. The editor was also quite slow and crashy for years which drove the proliferation of these libraries and the "don't use the storyboard editor" meme accompanying them. It's gotten a lot better in the last ~2 years and I haven't had a crash in heavy day-to-day usage for quite some time. If Apple could improve the XML output format to be easier to review, eliminate the serialization/deserialization weirdnesses, introduce a visual diff-and-merge tool, and improve the performance just a bit more, the Interface Builder would be excellent, but as is, I see why a lot of people don't like using it, especially on big projects with many collaborators.

sachadso 11y ago

Using Interface builder is Great indeed it just has a ton of other issues down the road, this article sums it well : http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/why-i-dont-use-interface-builder http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/why-i-dont-use-interface-build...