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IMHO XCode is both great and terrible. I miss it when I'm in vscode, but I also hate it when I'm in XCode, if that makes sense? It's like a heavy IDE of yore,

IMHO XCode is both great and terrible. I miss it when I'm in vscode, but I also hate it when I'm in XCode, if that makes sense? It's like a heavy IDE of yore, which means the more you comply with it, the more you'll enjoy it—but that also leaves a feeling that you're not really in control. It's definitely worse than it could be if Apple cared enough to make it half as snappy as vscode feels. The shitty support for vim keybindings alone makes me furious (e.g you can't redo most actions like "c" or "r") Finally, I'm not sure if you were using SwiftUI back then or if you were fighting with storyboards in UIKit. The latter is an ATROCIOUS experience I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy. SwiftUI in comparison feels like the future, even if it's still in its early days and some stuff needs to be ironed out

jwells89 3y ago
Storyboards are indeed terrible. XIBs are notably better due to not bogging the editor down with N screens but still not great. Both suck for version control being gigantic blobs of machine generated XML. This is why I abandoned storyboards and XIBs in iOS development 7-8 years ago. UIKit is actually a pretty decent code-only experience, particularly since the addition of anchor-based autolayout constraint building. It was actually a major point of frustration that it’s not practical to go code-only with Android Framework on Android and WinUI/Windows App SDK on Windows, both of which are heavily invested in XML layout and resource files. Jetpack Compose thankfully fixes this on Android at least.
- steve1977 3y ago
  > Storyboards are indeed terrible. XIBs are notably better due to not bogging the editor down with N screens but still not great. Both suck for version control being gigantic blobs of machine generated XML. I guess these problems stem from their heritage in XIBs being NIBs, i.e. binary “deep frozen” object graphs. Using XML to make them version-control “friendly” was always a bit of a crutch.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    It also doesn’t help that Xcode will make random little edits to storyboards/XIBs by simply viewing them. It conditions developers to commit minor changes to these files without looking closely which leads to unintentional changes finding their way into production.

jwells89 3y ago

Storyboards are indeed terrible. XIBs are notably better due to not bogging the editor down with N screens but still not great. Both suck for version control being gigantic blobs of machine generated XML. This is why I abandoned storyboards and XIBs in iOS development 7-8 years ago. UIKit is actually a pretty decent code-only experience, particularly since the addition of anchor-based autolayout constraint building. It was actually a major point of frustration that it’s not practical to go code-only with Android Framework on Android and WinUI/Windows App SDK on Windows, both of which are heavily invested in XML layout and resource files. Jetpack Compose thankfully fixes this on Android at least.

steve1977 3y ago
> Storyboards are indeed terrible. XIBs are notably better due to not bogging the editor down with N screens but still not great. Both suck for version control being gigantic blobs of machine generated XML. I guess these problems stem from their heritage in XIBs being NIBs, i.e. binary “deep frozen” object graphs. Using XML to make them version-control “friendly” was always a bit of a crutch.
- jwells89 3y ago
  It also doesn’t help that Xcode will make random little edits to storyboards/XIBs by simply viewing them. It conditions developers to commit minor changes to these files without looking closely which leads to unintentional changes finding their way into production.