[lurch_mojoff]

Would you care to qualify that. In my experience it has been the exact opposite -- setting up your UI in Interface Builder has always reduced the amount of code necessary and has allowed quite complex view hierarchies to appear pretty much flat in code. And I'm taking about iOS UIs, for which a bunch of the code saving goodies of AppKit Interface Builder are not available -- things like Cocoa bindings and the new auto layout machinery in Lion.

[coreycollins]

I find that added generated NIB files just dirty the code base. Of course this is just my preference. However, when I was a beginner, beginning to create more advanced views, I found it easier to programmably add them then to use Interface Builder. I like to be in control of my views and it helps me better visualize the view hierarchy. One example, was trying to create a UITabController with UINavigationController's for each tab. It can be done with Interface Builder, but it takes a lot of steps.

[lurch_mojoff]

I still don't understand how a bunch of stored-to-file object graphs "dirty the code base" but I guess you are right -- it is a preference thing. Believe me, I have weirder quirks than that when it comes to coding.

Your example, however, is probably amongst the worst to support the argument you are making. Here are the steps to create a tab bar view with four tabs, each containing a navigation view, and those containing alternating table views and plain views:

- drag out a UITabBarController

- remove the two default UIViewControllers instantiated with it

- drag out to the tab bar four UINavigationControllers

- select each tab and drag out to the center area of the view a UITableViewController or UIViewController

- customize to your heart's content

- there is no step six…

In my guestimate this will take at least 20 lines of boilerplate code, even with the minimal amount of customization. And you’d be missing out on all the rest of the benefits of NIBs, like the ability to see (and to some degree test) your UI without having to build and run your application or the ability to send it off for localization to a collaborator.

[coreycollins]

I think during XCode3 I just really started to hate NIB's haha. They seemed slow to initiate and load. I admit that i haven't yet used Interface Builder in XCode4 and it apparently has fixed a lot of those "weird" bugs.

[bdittmer]

No, no it doesn't take a lot of steps. Perhaps I'll do a screencast to prove it.