It's a lot of code to write, but extremely understandable when you come back to read it a year later and wonder "what the heck do the parameters to this function do?"

I've only just started learning iOS development (Swift, not Objective-C) and although initially the code looks quite complicated, Xcode more than makes up for it. Its auto-complete functionality makes it very fast to write these rather lengthy lines of code. Plus it's a really descriptive way of writing code.

Also, like with many languages, once you understand the basic syntax it doesn't look as complicated anymore. (First time you came across Ruby it might have looked quite complicated as well).

Yes, if you watch an experienced developer in Xcode, you will see that the autocomplete makes writing out these sorts of things very, very fast.

In fairness, the code in that screenshot is horrifically formatted, wrapped, and indented. Properly written and formatted, that code would suck much less.

I think it's his browser width. Here's what it looks like for me: http://cl.ly/image/0I2T2G3F0B3I

You can get pretty much native performance out of a cross-platform SDK like: http://www.appcelerator.com/titanium/titanium-sdk

and make the dev environment even more rapid with something like: https://github.com/dbankier/JAST

I don't quite get why you would develop in XCode & Android unless you were trying to squeeze out the last x% in performance or were doing something super custom like Instagram.