That said, at least for me, the REPL is a bit overhyped. In most cases the stuff you will tweak with the REPL is UI stuff. But the thing is if you are using IB and designing your screens in Photoshop or Sketch, the UI should be pretty much in place before it hits the code.
As far as other use-cases beyond UI, if you are doing any other type of "testing" in the REPL, you probably should be writing unit tests :)
For anything nontrivial, IB is more of a hindrance than an aid. You probably are constructing the view programmatically.
I've worked on a number of large iOS projects over the last four years — I tend to select whether or not to use IB on a per-project basis. About 60% of our projects end up using IB for the majority of their UI layout.
Recently we built a very large educational app for teachers. IB was great — we had a number of key storyboards, most of the design happened very fast. We developed strict standards by which we developed further styling in code (for things that IB couldn't handle like pattern images, and stretchable images).
Merging Storyboards was a bit of a pain — which was exacerbated by the fact that it's much easier for multiple developers to touch a single storyboard than to touch a single xib. But using DiffMerge as our default git mergetool makes things better.
There are definitely times when IB is not suitable — especially if you want to develop reusable dynamic layouts or controls.
But when you have strict specs, designers working on the project in advance, and clients signing off on particular designs, IB is great.
That said, merging xib's is a pain in the ass. I wish they were more like Android's human readable layouts.
I'm a developer, looking at the page to find out about a potentially useful tool. I'm not a graphic design student looking for inspiration; I value succinct, direct information, preferably with short examples that I don't have to go hunting (or scrolling miles) for. (Are there any real developers who seriously prefer a video?)
After the first couple of screens of scrolling with no more than a couple of scattered words, I gave up. The information density is so low that I've forgotten what the last screen says before I've read the next one.
Mainly, though, I hate reinventing wheels. I'm not a very good programmer and it would take me far too long. I'll always look for a friendly giant to stand on before I try and build my own ladder.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RkvUX_4Ros
It demonstrates the creation of a graphical element in a live coding environment. The finished badge is then transferred to an iOS app and tweaked interactively.
One thing that isn't shown is that the code is simultaneously saved to a file within the Xcode project, so live tweaks and XCode project stay in sync.
>One thing that isn't shown is that the code is simultaneously saved to a file within the Xcode project, so live tweaks and XCode project stay in sync.
That's one thing I've yet to solve for superdb but would really love to get figured out. If you (or anyone) has any suggestions on how to implement it, let me know.
You can read a bit more about it here: http://www.shopify.com/technology/7183290-introducing-the-su...
