I've been writing iOS apps for a while now and gradually went from doing the UI entirely programmatically to using the Interface Builder intensively. I'm now thinking about using the new Storyboarding feature for some of my new projects, but I don't have enough experience or knowledge with it to calculate the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. Can anybody give some examples or information about when using Storyboarding payed off and when it was a waste of time?
Advantages of Storyboarding
- It's cool - suave way to design interfaces
- Use of
StoryBoardSeguesto identify navigation/modal relationships - If your app supports multiple devices, good way to organize different views (by storyboard file rather than naming, etc)
- Nice for prototyping
- Prototype
UITableViewCellcan save time
Disadvantages of Storyboarding
- It's a runtime feature, so I believe it is only available in iOS 5
StoryBoardSeguesare kind of rigid in my experience and you may make use ofprepareForSeguea lot- Like IB, not very friendly with other display engines and toolkits
- Makes it hard to share designs for a single view or set of views - you have to send all or nothing
These seem kind of superficial, I guess I haven't given it much thought... At first I was gung-ho about story boards, but now I've reverted to IB or even just programatic view configuration... The more I use them, the less I like them, and the more they feel like a gimmick/waste of time.