This is a best-practices question.
When one makes a new Swift application for OSX, it builds a Main.storyboard and places that physically in the Base.lproj folder, but logically within the app's main "group".
I decided to separate different parts of the UI into different storyboards, so I added a Document.storyboard and Preferences.storyboard.
In retrospect it's not clear if this was the correct way to do this - for items that consist of a single window or view, should I use storyboards or just use XIBs? I've read the Apple documents but I'm not clear on the practical differences. Are storyboards "replacing" XIBs, are they the new hotness that I should use from now on?
Now I will be expanding the project with additional views, specifically a series of sheets used for editing certain features of the document. Should I put these all in a single storyboard, one XIB, or individual XIBs? Is there any strong reason to select one over the others?
And finally, when I added my storyboards, it placed them in the root of the project folder. Should these really be moved to Base.lprog?
This is something I've been thinking about, too. I've recently gotten into OS X development, so I'll share my amateur view of XIBs vs storyboards. To those of you that are more familiar with this, feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken.
Interface Builder inside Xcode seems to do a pretty good job of allowing you to put a skeleton in place, but doesn't always provide all the necessary customization options for a view. When using storyboards, I frequently end up with projects that are half visually based, and half code. It's like working on a cyborg.
Nibs/Xibs suffer from the same problem, but they don't even try to implement transitions. From what I can tell, they represent single windows, views, or menu items. This makes them simpler and more modular. You get to write the code that handles the wiring of them together, and, at first, it may seem like more trouble, but it actually feels like a benefit to me because of the level of control gained. Storyboards can do a lot of this for you, but I personally tend to prefer having it all together in the code.
The ideal solution, to me, would be for Apple to implement a more abstract form of user interface design: where each window (or iOS view, depending on the platform) was contained in a nib, and a Storyboard was only a transition mapping between the nibs. For example: You create all your windows and menus, and then use the storyboard to connect them all, but the storyboard can't edit any of the views details, only transitions and connections.
That being said, I'm quickly getting to the point where I prefer nibs and do all the other coding myself. If nothing else, I'm becoming a better programmer for it. Hope this helps!
Related
I am following a tutorial video on how to allow users to edit their profile. In this tutorial, they are using storyboards and I am not. I was wondering, do I have to use storyboards in order to follow along? Or can I use their code to plug into mine without the storyboard?
According to Apple documentation:
A storyboard is a visual representation of the user interface of an
iOS application, showing screens of content and the connections
between those screens. A storyboard is composed of a sequence of
scenes, each of which represents a view controller and its views;
scenes are connected by segue objects, which represent a transition
between two view controllers.
As you are probably guessing, storyboards contain information about widgets, animations, views that are required by the code you will be adding to yours. Additionally, Storyboards also contain the connection between the visual elements and the code (outlets and actions). All of that can be created programmatically but the code you will be pasting from this tutorial, if it's coming from a project that includes storyboards, won't contain this associated logic.
So, at this point, it would seem highly unwise to add complexity to your tutorial to recreate these elements at once. What I would suggest is for you to follow the tutorial and then try to remove some of these elements and replace them by code to obtain similar results just as an exercise to learn. Keep in mind that Storyboards have been around to simplify the design of UI in the application, so I would recommend for you to master their usage instead of shying away from them.
What is advantage and disadvantage not using storyboard and xib.
I am building an application without using storyboard and xib, what happen if project is build programatically.
Storyboards dont only speed up development, but they also help identify UX issues and get an overview of the current UX of an application.
Software should be built with the future in mind and the storyboard allows an entry point into the project for other developers or designers, as well as yourself, if you for some reason left the project for a while.
Having everything in code or even xib files wastes time, even great documentation is slower to process that a visual layout of the apps UI.
Xibs on their own can cause design issues.
For performance, storyboards are optimized.
Overall as the name suggests, its the visual story or flow for your app. You should also split different functionality of your app into different storyboards e.g. if you have a side menu that loads different view stacks, use different storyboards as needed.
Obviously its not 1 or the other with storyboards and code, it depends on the situation, you might even use a xib here and there. Software is dynamic and new ideas come about, not all have fixed solutions, that would be boring.
Just last week I decided to dive into the world of Swift and Xcode development, and as of yesterday I am actively working on a new application. I have a lot of experience with Java Swing, but working with that is obviously a lot different than working with Apple's fancy interface builders and storyboards.
I am trying to develop a single-window application that has many different views that can be navigated by buttons. I tried to wrap my head around the way the storyboard works, but even after all my reading of the documentation I don't know really what I'm doing - I'm so used to working in hard code. It came to the point where I wrote my app's entire network layer just to avoid working with the interface.
Basically I have a set of different NSViewControllers, each with references to a few of their components (buttons, labels, etc) and I want certain buttons to be able to change the current view controller (preferably with a segue animation) to a different one. How can I approach this? I would guess that this isn't hard to achieve, but I am lost. Any help would be appreciated!
Let me know if I need to submit any code - I do have the basic classes written but nothing relating to this.
Thanks,
-Aidan
I’m risking this question getting closed as “not constructive / argumentative”, as there is no single definitive answer that I’m looking for… but I hope we can make this work. Bear with me.
So. Let’s talk about Mac apps. Cocoa and AppKit are the workhorses on Mac desktop, that can be used to construct classic-looking Mac UI-s. Here’s an example.
The iTunes preferences dialog is a classic-looking Mac UI. Standard toolbar, checkboxes, sliders, separators, buttons. Mac engineers know how to make these, and it’s easy and fun these days with AutoLayout & co.
More recently, though, another style of Mac apps is emerging, that I’d call “modern” apps. In particular, I’m interested in document-based apps, where the document is single-window, decorated with crisp-looking sidebars and other components. Here are two examples (Sketch and Pages).
I’m interested in ideas about how these UI-s are constructed, and what kind of components are used. Is AppKit sufficient to achieve this? I read somewhere, but can’t recall the reference, that iWork these days largely forgoes AppKit and the UI just consists of a bunch of hand-drawn CALayers. I’m not so much interested in the document canvas (a whole another subject) as I am in the sidebar, toolbar and their contents.
OK, let’s try to salvage this question with some specific subquestions…
General window composition for both apps—is it NSToolbar on top, and NSSplitView in the body area, or something more?
Sketch tree view on the left—can I achieve this with NSOutlineView, or is there something more going on?
Pages sidebar—what kind of AppKit components are used here, vs custom drawing? (One curious fact that tells me that custom drawing is going on—when I expand/collapse the “Spacing” or “Bullets & Lists” sections, there is no animation.)
Don't be fooled by current design choices. IMHO we're building apps the same way we always did it, albeit single window interfaces became more popular in recent years.
But that's just a matter of whether you stuff your NSView subclasses in subviews or dedicated windows.
The views themselves shouldn't care at all - in a good application design.
The apps you've mentioned use a mixture of custom and standard controls.
Like apps always did - back to the days of NextStep (or System 7).
I'm getting back in to Cocoa development on the Mac after a long stint doing iPhone work. My previous experience with Cocoa on the Mac has just been dinky little tools. I'm looking to build something serious.
Looking at a modern Cocoa application like iPhoto (or Mail or Things or....) many apps use the Single-Window, Source-List based approach. I'm trying to wrap my head around that as best I can because it seems to provide a good experience. However, I'm having a little trouble. Here's how I think it should look, but I'm wondering how others are doing it, and what's really the best way:
Starting point of the app is an AppDelegate object which, after launching, creates a Window[Controller?] from a nib, along with setting up its data (from, say CoreData)
WindowController loads a window which essentially just has an NSSplitView in it.
Left side of the splitview has an NSTableView or NSOutlineView which is set to have the SourceList style.
Right side has the main content of the app, depending on which item of the table view is selected.
I would assume somewhere (where?) there are NSViewControllers managing each of the different views which will appear in the right side (think how iPhoto has All Photos, Events, Faces, Places, etc. and I imagine they could all appear in different nibs... is this correct?).
Those view controllers are probably bound to the source list on the left.. how does that work (source list is backed by an NSArrayController of NSViewControllers maybe?).
Anyway, those are my thoughts, am I completely off-base or...? I've looked around the web, found this post here, and I've looked at some Apple source code but I can't seem to wrap my head around it. Any guidance would be welcome.
Breaking the views up into separate nibs is mainly good if you're going to swap out some views for others, since you can load them lazily. And yes, in a modern app, you would use NSViewController, or perhaps KTViewController from KTUIKit (see the posts she co-wrote about NSViewController)
Don't just go running into the arms of the source list, however. A single-window interface can be good for simple apps, but it can quickly become unwieldy when you have many things going on, as they may be better served by breaking them into separate windows; iTunes and Xcode both provide many examples of this (especially the latter, since you can switch it between SWI and MWI).
You need to think about whether a multiple-window or single-window interface would be better for your app. There is no one answer for all apps; it depends entirely on your app, and what you want it to do, and how you want it to look—you (plus the rest of your team, if you have one) are the only one who can answer this question. You may want to do some paper prototyping to do quick experiments in each direction so that you can hold at least fake examples of both UIs up against each other.
One easy way to get a feel for the way nibs are split up is to just go into the iPhoto directory and start opening up nibs
If you want to explore a little more into the class structure you can try browsing around using F-Script