Will Xib approach deprecate in the near future because of storyboards? [closed]

Question

I know this topic was hot and there's a lot of discussions on that, however we still use xibs in our apps even if minimum deployment target is iOS5 (and soon will swith to iOS6). We have looked and read a lot about storyboards and it seems Apple is pushing this approach as a prefered way of doing UI stuff, however we can't see any real benefit of using such "toy" tool. Storyboards might be convenient for relatively small one developer project app, however there's no real benefit in large multiple dev projects, because merging git/svn storyboard conflicts is pain in the neck, so stoyboards must be splitted in modules and might even contain only one screen, so it becomes very similar to Xib appraoch in such cases. Also, medium and large apps have a little bit complex navigation sequences.

So far I see only one benefit - visualisation of screens and navigation in one place. Yes, we dont' have such navigation flow when using Xibs, however, you can use any UML modeling tool (fro example, Astah community free version tool) to draw UML screen navigation plan diagram for that (like we do), and that's it. All the UI might be conveniently decomposed into Xibs and it's very easy and straight forward to load and add them from code. Even if we are starting to develop relatively small app, it might (and it will) grow in size later, so using a flexible Xibs at start, will prevent you from additional workarounds later.

So, these are my thoughts and observations, and I would like to hear other opinions of devs who have developed large apps with storyboards and what pros do they see. My biggest concern is will Apple deprecate Xibs, because we are starting a new big project that might last 2 and more years, so it would be uncomfortable to use an approach that will deprecate in near future even if it's convenient and prefered way of doing UI stuff.

Answer 1

Without insider knowledge this question is pretty much impossible to answer definitively.

In general, using the technologies that Apple promote is probably the safest. But not always -- people were burned by 64-bit Carbon and garbage collection.

Having said that, I don't see XIBs going away any time soon. They're too well used on both iOS and the Mac that Apple couldn't get rid of them in a short period even if they wanted to.