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It's hard for me to believe that Storyboards or AutoLayout were designed by someone that actually builds non-trivial apps for a living. They're the kind of tech

It's hard for me to believe that Storyboards or AutoLayout were designed by someone that actually builds non-trivial apps for a living. They're the kind of technologies that look good in a one-hour conference demo but quickly fall apart in real world use. After nearly throwing my laptop across the room on my latest project I ripped AutoLayout out of my project entirely and went back to springs & struts + frame math. What this means though is that a layout I can build in five minutes in Android with <GridLayout> takes hours in iOS and is utterly opaque to version control. This is a cost I have to pass on to my clients.

seivan 14y ago
You need to learn AutoLayout putting the blame on it won't help you.
- cageface 14y ago
  I understand it. The problem is that not only is it a fundamentally flawed concept but the tools are inadequate. Moving a control by as much as one pixel in IB can completely scramble your constraints, including deleting user constraints attached to properties. The API is ridiculously verbose and the visual language is underpowered and cryptic. It's sad but going back to manual frame calculations actually saved me a lot of time. I think a lot of iOS devs don't realize how crap it is because they haven't taken the time to learn how other platforms solve these problems in a much more logical & developer friendly way.
  - conradev 14y ago
    I agree that the IB implementation is crap. The API, on the other hand, is very nice. Although constraints can be slightly verbose, they are ages better than having to manually re-layout views after every single change of the superview's bounds. Spring and struts are nice, but cannot replace all of the CGGeometry math which is equally as, if not more, verbose than adding constraints. Autolayout is add-and-forget. The only downside is that it is iOS6+ only.
    - cageface 14y ago
      Have you done any Android dev? I find the various layout containers there far, far more intuitive and explicit and semantically clear. Let's face it, 95% of UI is nested grid layouts. Plus, having instant visual feedback for layout tweaks is a big time saver.
- micampe 14y ago
  Just let it be, cageface is on a mission.

seivan 14y ago

You need to learn AutoLayout putting the blame on it won't help you.

cageface 14y ago
I understand it. The problem is that not only is it a fundamentally flawed concept but the tools are inadequate. Moving a control by as much as one pixel in IB can completely scramble your constraints, including deleting user constraints attached to properties. The API is ridiculously verbose and the visual language is underpowered and cryptic. It's sad but going back to manual frame calculations actually saved me a lot of time. I think a lot of iOS devs don't realize how crap it is because they haven't taken the time to learn how other platforms solve these problems in a much more logical & developer friendly way.
- conradev 14y ago
  I agree that the IB implementation is crap. The API, on the other hand, is very nice. Although constraints can be slightly verbose, they are ages better than having to manually re-layout views after every single change of the superview's bounds. Spring and struts are nice, but cannot replace all of the CGGeometry math which is equally as, if not more, verbose than adding constraints. Autolayout is add-and-forget. The only downside is that it is iOS6+ only.
  - cageface 14y ago
    Have you done any Android dev? I find the various layout containers there far, far more intuitive and explicit and semantically clear. Let's face it, 95% of UI is nested grid layouts. Plus, having instant visual feedback for layout tweaks is a big time saver.
micampe 14y ago
Just let it be, cageface is on a mission.