Question

I am building a basic app interface which will have a mixture of text, inputfields and buttons. In order to get a working version for project deadline, I thought I would use the default Interface Builder (IB) components for the first iterations and then if there is suffiecient time, I would like to ‘jazz up’ the interface by adding customised components..

How easy is it to swap over IB components with customised ones at a later stage?

Answer 1

It depends on what you mean exactly by swap over IB components, but in general I would say that IB has full support for customization of your UI within its own conceptual framework. On the other hand, it is pretty obvious that defining your UI programmatically will give you all the customization possibilities you might think of.

In a sense, you can see IB as a way to declare graphically the elements of your UI, their relationships, and have them automatically instantiated for you when the IB xib file is loaded. This is a very flexible mechanism in itself and allows you plenty of possibilities.

Say, for example, that you have a button somewhere in your IB view. In a first release, you could set the class of that button to a plain UIButton; later, you simply specify that that button class is actually a YourCustomClass and you have it, your UI will use your custom button without you having to change much of code (maybe one line or two apart from the custom button implementation). The same holds true for many other kinds of UI elements.

Besides that case, there are classes, like UITableView, that I think are better customizable outside of IB (i.e., by specifying the customization, e.g., the custom cell, programmatically). But still in this case, having the interface defined in IB in the first place is not a big hindrance either, and you simply add the code that you need to your program.

Anyway, there are some customization that are not easily possible with IB. One example could be having more control on how and when your UI components are allocated; so, say, you are restricted to your xib file to be instantiated all at once, while programmatically you could trick every aspect of that. Or, there might be UI elements that are intrisically better suited for a programmatically definition (say, a scrollable grid of pictures), so IB would not fit the bill, or give little support for that (but you would not be able to define that UI elements with it in the first place).