It's funny to me that people can hold the belief that the iOS UI design tools are somehow the worst while iOS has consistently had the best mobile UI in terms of aesthetics (subjective), usability and performance (objective).
If the tools were so bad, why do they always seem to achieve a superior result?
A lot of stuff comes "for free" with iOS, and I find that iOS developers tend to care more about usability and design than developers for other platforms since it's heavily incentivized by Apple and iOS users.
Yes, and one of those things that comes for free is a very good UI layout system and tooling.
I do, actually. Have been for about 6 years.
I don't want a WYSIWYG editor for UI. No other platform does this. Because it doesn't scale.
Tried to merge storyboards before? Ha.
Even programmatically...I'm sorry, but nobody can convince me that the following is a sane way to create UI:
NSLayoutConstraint.constraints( withVisualFormat: "V:|-23-[appNameLabel]", metrics: nil, views: views)
I do, I think they are the best UI design tool out there (used Microsoft tools, Android tools and GTK designer) and simply has no comparasion.
Most of the times, people poo-pooing AutoLayout are people that start rushing out the design without thinking about it, or people that rush to stack overflow to "fix" the problem and don't care to learn the system (apple provied great videos from WWDC).