I’d like to know more about the pros and cons of using interface builder when developing iPhone/iPad apps.
I’ve written a fairly complex and customized app that’s on the app store right now, but all of the interfaces are hand coded as they are fairly complex. I’ve customised the navigation and tab bars with backgrounds, table view cells are manually drawn for speed, and some views are complex and scalable with many subviews.
I’m pondering whether or not to start using interface builder but I’m not sure to what extent I’ll use it and whether it’s worth it at all. Is it quicker? Can things still be easily customised?
Any advice would be most welcome!
There is absolutely no reason not to use it. One thing that scares people off is their experiences with other GUI tools, things that generated code for them or some other mess. Then the problem becomes that it is hard to round-trip the interface, you cannot easily modify things once they are generated because of the complexity of pushing those changes back into the emitted code.
Interface Builder does not generate code, it uses NSArchiver to read and write an actual object graph for the GUI. This has many benefits, starting with the fact that you can easily round-trip the interface and make incremental changes. It really is all good, use it. 🙂