[sandofsky]

In all the teams I've worked on, designers have worked out pixel positions and text alignment by the time I see the mocks. I don't find much value in realtime feedback.

Nibs are handy if you're sticking to stock UI and stock behavior. Programmatic layout takes longer to setup the boilerplate, but once it's in place, I find it about as easy to work in code as nibs. With complex designs, I find it significantly easier to work programmatically.

[danilocampos]

> In all the teams I've worked on, designers have worked out pixel positions and text alignment by the time I see the mocks. I don't find much value in realtime feedback.

Very few beginner iOS developers will have a design team at their beck and call.

[kalms]

But some of us are both ;)

[danilocampos]

Quite so! As a beast of just such a color, I love nibs. Huge timesaver, especially when configuring custom buttons with different image and label alignments.

[jimbokun]

And what do you think of NIBs, from the perspective of each of those two hats you are wearing?

[kalms]

Being fairly new to this, and doing a large amount of experimenting, I enjoy being able to quickly mockup a (sort of) working prototype, without having to type too much code. During the learning process, you just want an interface, and not much else.

I guess it comes down to workflow, and that's always a personal thing.

[gurkendoktor]

Storyboards are especially great if the app is not a hundred percent mocked out. I have seen many mocks that described the app's CI very well, but have been a complete mess as far as the modal/tab/navigation flow is concerned. In the last app, it took a few storyboard iterations before everything was logical and these iterations would have much more painful in code.

[cageface]

Bingo! WYSIWYG is for the designer. Developers need powerful declarative tools that support modular development, reuse, internationalization, flexible layouts, and work well with version control.

[ihaveajob]

True. But for a beginner iOS programmer (the intended audience of this write up), it makes absolute sense to use nibs as much as possible. I know it helped me a lot.