[josv]

iOS and macOS had a visual editor forever. Interface Builder was a really interesting take on visual layout, instantiating real objects in the interface and serializing them into nib / xib / storyboard files ready for use in your app.

Most developers I know in the ecosystem tried and tried to like the visual editor, but ended up falling back to code. Why? Source code is pretty great. It’s easy to read, write, share, diff, and organize.

SwiftUI has, again, a very modern and interesting take on visual editing. The code is the truth, but there’s a rich, realtime preview canvas that makes rountripping possible. For reasons, it’s unfortunately all but unusable for a lot of folks with complex Xcode projects, but it’s a very good idea.

In summary: Visual layout editors and text are both pretty great. The devil’s in the details.

[jwells89]

I find that Interface Builder, while not great for editing XIBs on iOS and storyboards on either platform (it's slow and buggy in those cases), is actually still fairly pleasant when working on Mac XIBs. My go-to is pure code UIKit on iOS, but I still reach for XIBs frequently for Mac stuff.

If IB's performance and stability issues could be fixed, I think its biggest problem is the near-unintelligible spaghetti XML that it generates for XIBs and storyboards, which is a huge pain for VCS and frequently cause of merge conflicts (which must be manually corrected). If they just cleaned up the XML output or switched to something more friendly to manual editing that'd help a lot.

[raydev]

Android Studio (before Jetpack Compose) split the difference and offered easily editable/readable XML with textual autocomplete AND a visual editor. I much preferred that after having spent years working in Xcode's Interface Builder.

xibs and storyboards were also XML but IB would insert attributes that had no visual impact, move lines of XML around simply upon opening the file, or randomly change x/y values of the viewport upon opening the file, or update float values to use 15 decimal places instead of 2, and so on. Apple's insistence on making the visual editor have priority over text led to a worse developer experience as teams grew.