Building Apps In Swift With Storyboards

Nerval's Lobster writes Apple touts the Swift programming language as easy to use, thanks in large part to features such as Interface Builder, a visual designer provided in Xcode that allows a developer to visually design storyboards. In theory, this simplifies the process of designing both screens and the connections between screens, as it needs no code and offers an easy-to-read visual map of an app's navigation. But is Swift really so easy (or at least as easy as anything else in a developer's workflow)? This new walkthrough of Interface Builder (via Dice) shows that it's indeed simple to build an app with these custom tools... so long as the app itself is simple. Development novices who were hoping that Apple had created a way to build complex apps with a limited amount of actual coding might have to spend a bit more time learning the basics before embarking on the big project of their dreams.

Comments

I WANT

[bondsbw]

I want to be able to code this to make a game:

int main(int argc, const char* argv[])
{
        CreateGameThatIsSortOfLikeAngryBirdsAndMakeMeMillionsOfDollarsOvernight();
}

Anything else is too hard.

Re:I WANT

[Anonymous Coward]

int main(int argc, const char* argv[])
{
        CreateGameThatIsSortOfLikeAngryBirdsAndMakeMeMillionsOfDollarsOvernight();
        return 0;
}

FTFY

They are right to say storyboard ...

[perpenso]

"Storyboards" are Apple's name for a user interface layout tool, its not a logic flow tool so it is not really like flowcharts. A storyboard is basically a view pane where you layout the visual elements and controls, and define some constraints involved in repositioning and resizing for different resolutions. There is very limited flow control. Things like clicking on this button brings up a different storyboard.

In short storyboards let you mock up a user interface, including one view launching a different view. If you are nostalgic for the 90s think back to Microsoft's Visual Studio GUI layout and glue code generation tools. Its pretty much the same sort of stuff.

Re:The complexity has to go somewhere

[blue9steel]

The dream of some fancy tool that builds a complex app for you (since you're an "ideas person", not a programmer) is always going to be a fantasy.

Always is a long time. Try these statements on for size as a comparison:

"I also lay aside all ideas of any new works or engines of war, the invention of which long-ago reached its limit, and in which I see no hope for further improvement..." - Sextus Julius Frontinus 84 C.E.

"What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?" - The Quarterly Review 1825

"The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it... Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient." - Dr. Alfred Velpeau 1839

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -Lord Kelvin 1895

"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." - Albert Einstein, 1932.

Consider if you will:

An assembler is a way of automatically creating machine code

A compiler is a way of automatically creating assembly code

A ______ is a way of automatically creating program code

Is there some reason we shouldn't expect the blank to be filled in and efforts to move up the stack yet again? As computers become more powerful we can afford ever more complex layers of abstraction.