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by carson 5069 days ago
As much as I love seeing example apps like this I think beginners probably need to be cautious looking at this code. Here are a couple things that concern me:

* The UI is all hand coded. Not to start a religious war but interface builder makes supporting different devices a lot easier.

* There is some hairy concurrency stuff going on like this https://github.com/nothingmagical/cheddar-ios/blob/master/Cl...
4 comments
hboon 5069 days ago
If you build lots of custom UI and animation, it's pretty hard to do it only with IB. E.g. with a custom component, you see a gray rect instead of how things are laid out, and you'd still need to write the custom bits in code anyway. Now you have the mess in 2 places.

There's also other reasons like version control, being able to copy-n-paste, using constants, etc.

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aaronblohowiak 5069 days ago
Using IB without understanding how stuff is hand-coded is harder. In my workflows (solo iOS projects..) I have found manual interface creation to have less friction and less OMGWTFBBQ!?!? than trying to get everything working with IB.. not to mention that some properties aren't exposed in IB.
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delinka 5069 days ago
On UI: I cannot appreciate the opacity with which IB creates interfaces. I can't see at a glance what components and objects are related, bound, connected, etc.

That said, it's a fine tool to get you off the ground, but I'd rather see code and know how things are laid out than have to guess as I click inspectors, hover over connections, reference source files...

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farmer_ted 5069 days ago
That "hairy" stuff is a straightforward use of GCD semaphores to signal when an animation has finished. I just spent 20 minutes reading up on GCD and dispatch_semaphore_wait(). This technique is elegant rather than hairy.
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carson 5069 days ago
I just picked a line out of the area to point to. I'll pose a few questions that go into more about why I believe this is code that isn't straightforward and in general a bad reference point for a beginner:

* Can you tell me why that entire block of code gets dispatched to one queue then right into the main queue?

* Can you tell me what queue the animation completion blocks run on and why it might matter?

* Can you tell me what queue the network request runs on?

* Do you think the animation completes before the network request finishes? Can you tell me why/why not?

* What happens if the network request fails?

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