iPhone app without using Interface Builder

interface-builder, iphone

Solution

Personally, my applications use no NIBs within them, but that's more of a matter of how I started doing development than anything else. I transitioned over from doing Mac development (where I use Interface Builder almost every day) to iPhone from when the first beta SDKs were released. Initially, there was no Interface Builder, and even when it came you couldn't do a lot of things with it, so I never took the time to really get to know it on the iPhone. It's more a matter of me doing what I'm familiar with.

Jeff LaMarche makes a convincing argument in his article "Don't Fear the Interface Builder" for you to use Interface Builder wherever you can, and I encourage new developers to learn to use it first before dropping down to programmatic user interface generation. It saves you a tremendous amount of time for interfaces using standard elements.

Some people have argued that there is a performance benefit to be had using purely programmatic interfaces, but Matt Gallagher ran a series of benchmarks and found that this speedup is only typically on the order of 5-10%. If you really want to shave that last bit off of your application's startup time, you might be able to have the best of both worlds with Adrian Kosmaczewski's nib2objc, which generates Objective-C from your NIB files.

However, there are plenty of times that you'll need to manipulate interfaces programmatically, such as for custom views and animations. This code can exist in parallel with Interface Builder without too much confusion. Again, it's more of a matter of personal preference at this point, but my recommendation is to use Interface Builder due to the time it can save you.

Problem

Original source