Should I use interface builder or not?

I'd like to know more about the pros and cons of using interface builder when developing iPhone/iPad apps.

I've written a fairly complex and customized app that's on the app store right now, but all of the interfaces are hand coded as they are fairly complex. I've customised the navigation and tab bars with backgrounds, table view cells are manually drawn for speed, and some views are complex and scalable with many subviews.

I'm pondering whether or not to start using interface builder but I'm not sure to what extent I'll use it and whether it's worth it at all. Is it quicker? Can things still be easily customised?

Any advice would be most welc开发者_JS百科ome!

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There is absolutely no reason not to use it. One thing that scares people off is their experiences with other GUI tools, things that generated code for them or some other mess. Then the problem becomes that it is hard to round-trip the interface, you cannot easily modify things once they are generated because of the complexity of pushing those changes back into the emitted code.

Interface Builder does not generate code, it uses NSArchiver to read and write an actual object graph for the GUI. This has many benefits, starting with the fact that you can easily round-trip the interface and make incremental changes. It really is all good, use it. :-)

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Personally I've found Interface Builder quite tricky to ramp up on, and sometimes it doesn't expose all the properties I want to edit (although this may have changed in the newer versions), so generally I've tended to create my UIs in code.

If you do use Interface Builder, make sure to consider localization. Apple's iPhone Developer docs recommend that the NIB be a localized resource that gets translated. That way the translator can see if the new text fits in the view. Unfortunately this means the translator needs to be capable of opening NIB files and editing them (or a developer needs to get involved in the translation process).

Personally, I prefer providing localized text resources and setting the text to the UI in code. I then provide comments in the Localizable.strings file saying how long the text can be, and providing any context the translator might need.

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There are no cons. Why dont use it? It makes everything easier :)