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by cageface 4829 days ago
I'm extremely unimpressed with the software engineering coming out of Apple recently. So many of their major new iOS APIs either don't work (Core Data/Sync), are just not well thought through (Storyboards) or seemed to have been designed with much real world testing at all (AutoLayout).

They have a great foundation in Obj-C/Cocoa Touch but I'm very quickly losing confidence in their ability to move the platform forward.

Android is much less mature in many ways but seems to be under much more expert guidance lately, both architecturally and at the UI level.

1 comments

I'm curious about what you think is wrong with Storyboards or AutoLayout. Storyboards certainly lack features so not all apps can be done with them, but nonetheless I think they're pretty solid. And AutoLayout works like magic, haven't had any problems (the IB-adds-constraints-for-you thing is annoying, but necessary)
Storyboards:

1. Interact poorly with version control.

2. Scale badly with a lot of VCs.

3. Segues are untyped and are inadequate to express complex navigation schemes.

AutoLayout:

1. Excessively verbose normal syntax and excessively limited and cryptic and untyped shorthand syntax.

2. IB tools are woefully inadequate for editing.

3. Small adjustments to complex layouts in IB completely scramble the constraints.

4. Does nothing to make the 95% use case of nested grid layouts explicit and simple.

2. Is the fundamental deal breaker. They're impossible to use in a multi-developer environment, because of the absolutely guaranteed merge conflicts at every turn.
I now have a one-VC per storyboard rule, which helps. I wouldn't use them all if I could design custom table/collection cells in xibs.