I can't agree with that at all – Apple's frameworks are among the most consistent I've ever seen. They have a small number of solid design patterns that they stick to that serve them very well. Picking up new frameworks is usually extremely easy because of this consistency. They are far beyond JavaScript in this respect.
> The worst thing is the drag and drop interface builder. I believe that the people who designed it never actually built an iPhone app with it. You can always get about 80% of what you want, then you have to resort to some outrageous hack and stitch the rest of it together with verbose imperative code.
Interface Builder certainly has its shortcomings, but the most frequent complaints I see about it are from people who haven't taken the time to learn it properly and fall back to imperative code in preference to learning how to use Interface Builder properly.
Also, 80% declarative UI and 20% imperative code is a pretty fair mix – unless you are designing extremely simple applications, you shouldn't expect to put together an entire user interface using nothing but drag and drop tools. That's not an effective way to work regardless of the quality of the drag and drop tools.
> Declarative web dev with html really is a huge step up from Apple's stupid drag and drop thing.
They are really two different worlds. Most of the time, one or the other is clearly the better choice for any given project, but it doesn't really make sense to say that one is better than the other overall.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7370013/how-to-set-kernin...
They really should have woken up and done a nice markup language and a styling language to go with it a very long time ago.
They work great for what they are designed for if you learn how to use them effectively. If you use them for things they aren't designed for or you assume that just because it's a GUI editor you can click around and build things without knowing what you are doing, then you're going to run into problems. This is not a problem with the tool.
> Here's how you adjust kerning
No, that's how you adjust kerning if you want to do it manually as a one-off task. It's trivial to wrap that up into something you can use in Interface Builder for day-to-day work.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was referring to wit the 80/20 split I mentioned. You use Interface Builder to create your user interface. It's not Photoshop. Fine control over the details, such as character-by-character adjustment of kerning, is more effectively done elsewhere. But just because you don't have Photoshop-level control over the details, it doesn't meant that it's not a great tool for the other 80% of GUI work.
I also don't understand how pointing out how to do kerning with code is a criticism of Interface Builder. You realise that if you create all your GUIs by avoiding Interface Builder you still have to use those APIs for kerning? That's not how you do kerning in Interface Builder, it's got nothing to do with Interface Builder. That's how you do it in code.
Most platforms that come out these days usually have support for:
1) dependency management
2) some sort of way to make build from command line (CI integration)
3) unit-testing framework and runner
4) SCM strategy that unifies unit-test/integration-test runner, build the thing, package it to the point of ready to ship...
How are these handle in the world of iOS which is backed by a multi-billion dollars company?
What does you mean by "declarative UI model"? You have been able to define UI declaratively using Interface Builder since day one. Do you mean something more than this?
> dependency management
CocoaPods or Carthage.
> some sort of way to make build from command line (CI integration)
xcodebuild.
> unit-testing framework and runner
XCTest.
> SCM strategy that unifies unit-test/integration-test runner, build the thing, package it to the point of ready to ship..
Can you give an example? Xcode Server does at least some of this. I don't think this is something commonly provided as a standard part of most platforms.
The biggest pain is apple's frameworks and ide. The APIs are very inelegant and arbitrary. The worst thing is the drag and drop interface builder. I believe that the people who designed it never actually built an iPhone app with it. You can always get about 80% of what you want, then you have to resort to some outrageous hack and stitch the rest of it together with verbose imperative code. Declarative web dev with html really is a huge step up from Apple's stupid drag and drop thing.
Hopefully Swift is the start of Apple putting together a sane, modern development environment.