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Kevin Fricke
3,117 Pointsto storyboard or not to storyboard
I was hoping for a bit of help. I am pretty new to ios and would really like to try to be using best practices. Is it best to use storyboarding or not. Are there times when it is useful and other times when it is not? Thanks, in advance, for any guidance you can provide.
3 Answers
Gareth Borcherds
9,372 PointsI'm by no means an expert, but if you're new to ios, you'll want to stick with storyboards. Besides, even if you use storyboards, that doesn't stop you from using custom completely coded views. It'll also depend on what you're trying to accomplish. Storyboards will make life a lot easier in general though and I recommend using them.
As far as using XCode or not, I would recommend using XCode. It's a pretty amazing IDE. It gives you instant feedback if you made a mistake in your code and can save you lots of time debugging and looking for errors when compiling. If you've never programmed in a language that required you to compile, you definitely should use XCode. I'm learning Objective-C after spending 5 years in PHP and SQL. Those scripting languages are a lot easier to use anything and finding errors is super easy. C based languages have some similarities, but require a lot more stringent way to building code and aren't as forgiving, so you might as well use the best tool Apple gives you to build iOS apps.
Justin Horner
Treehouse Guest TeacherHello Kevin,
From my experience, the use of Storyboards has not been an issue. I would lean toward using Storyboards until you encounter a particular scenario where a dynamic view is more appropriate.
XCode is an fantastic IDE and in my opinion should be used for anything that it supports.
I hope this helps.
Thomas Nilsen
14,957 PointsAs opposed to these guys I would recommend starting of with code. The reason for this, is storyboards is very much drag-and-drop. This makes it hard to understand what's actually going on, which is very important.
Have a look at the answers to this thread: https://teamtreehouse.com/forum/no-storyboard-really-no-seriously-really
Justin Horner
Treehouse Guest TeacherMy apologies Kevin, my original answer was written under the assumption that you already understood how Storyboards work under-the-hood. Thomas is correct, in my opinion.
Starting out with code is a great practice to understand what the tooling does behind the scenes. After you're comfortable with this, the decision is then up to you on whether you want to use Storyboards or not.
Although I've never had issues with Storyboards, using code can be much simpler for some tasks. Choose what you believe provides the most benefit to your project/team.
Kevin Fricke
3,117 PointsKevin Fricke
3,117 Pointsjust to clarify...i have taken the track and gone through endless tutorials and now I want to get started on my app. However, I don't want to start down a path that is not going to be best. I want to be able to collaborate with other developers on this and I have read that there may be issues when using storyboards. Whenever I write back end code I have always used a text editor. Should I just write all of the code in XCode or are the visual tools ok to use?
Thanks again.