Comments on: Building an iPhone App Without Interface Builder

By: Brian M. Lima

Brian M. Lima — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:16:36 +0000

This has to be the best tutorial I have seen yet on iphone apps.

As a veteran emacs gent I want to write code, not play within the confines of someone else’s GUI App. After trying interface builder for a few hours I realized that it just was not a tool for building complex applications, I was further disappointed that I could not find some functionality to export a window as just the raw code it would take to build it locally.

Not only did you give me a good starting point from an XCode project, but I also saw the basics of allocation,release, and some syntax examples that shed just the right amount of light on the some of the differences between Objective C and the languages I am used to writing in.

Anyway, you have probably saved me days of reading — trial and error, this will be one of the first tutorials I show new engineers.

Cheers!

By: Dan VanWinkle

Dan VanWinkle — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:58:48 +0000

@Gregory Thomson: I do all of my prototyping for clients in IB, just for speed purposes (as in really quick to program, not a speedy app), get the sign off from the client, then do everything programmatically. I would be pretty upset that it took a month and a half though, unless it was an ungodly huge program. It usually takes about 3 days to create an app using IB to demo the UI to the client.

By: brandon

brandon — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:06:54 +0000

Without seeing the code it’s really hard to say what was done. There’s an off chance that the NIB files are only there for the purpose of using them to push the view onto the screen and then all the UI elements are still being built in code. But if you were really building the whole app in code you wouldn’t really need the NIB files at all.

I guess long story short – fire up Xcode and see what’s in the nib files. If all the UI elements are there – then you didn’t get what you asked for. If they’re all just blank windows then whoever built the app was just using them to control the view size and still building all the elements manually.

By: Gregory Thomson

Gregory Thomson — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:47:10 +0000

Hello,
I have a question about building an iPhone app programmatically without using Interface Builder.
I outsourced a project to have a developer develop an iPhone app.
I asked that it be built programmatically without using Interface Builder so that I could better see how the coding gets done to create everything.
The developer sent an initial version of the GUI after a month and a half. It has about a dozen .NIB files – one for each of the screens.
Doesn’t that mean that he didn’t actually build the screens programmatically? I have yet to open the project on the Mac, so I can probably tell more then how he did things. Note: what he sent isn’t intended to be a prototype, as I gave him the design for the GUI, so no prototype really needed.
Pretty depressing when I look at what I requested, and see what he sent back, though – I asked for a 747, and got a glider in return I think.