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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Actually the opposite, likely. The tooling was preinstalled and ready to go, and you could largely click your way through building interactive experiences.

Compare this GUI-driven, mostly-discoverable flow with the incantations you need to know to set up a React interface, for example. It's night and day.

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Xcode/dev tools were not preinstalled, but just cost a registration on their site to download and install.

When OS X was still distributed on optical discs, it came with a dev tools disc for the first several releases. That how I personally stumbled upon Project Builder, Cocoa, etc. I may have never found it if I had to seek it out and download it.

What does macOS / iOS / iPadOS development look like today? Do you not have XCode with a GUI-driven workflow anymore? I only poked around iOS development during the iPhone 1/3G days, but I thought tooling has been constantly improving since then.

Disclaimer, I'm only a wannabe Apple platform developer, but the GUI-driven workflow is still the predominate way to develop for Apple platforms. The most radical change is the introduction of SwiftUI, which has you writing interfaces entirely with code, rather than using drag-n-drop components with Storyboards.

There’s quite a few iOS devs who ditched storyboards and XIBs years ago in favor of full code. I did several years ago, largely because Interface Builder became so much worse after it was merged into Xcode. That, and XIBs and storyboards suck to have to deal with merge conflicts on.

I still use XIBs when doing personal Mac Cocoa development though, because the experience there is still decent (though not as good as it was). Won’t touch storyboards with a ten foot pole though, they slow down IB too much and generally aren’t a good fit for desktop UI paradigms.

Most iOS teams I worked on did UI in code since Storyboards are a nightmare with more than one developer and version control.

The main difference is that now most development is actually not based on the platform but carried out with web tech. Which, compared to desktop tools, is light-years behind in usability.

honestly if you are doing native development and using the iOS/macOS tooling directly it is not that different than this. You basically have options, xibs and nibs like in this blog now have a new friend Storyboards that encompasses multiple screens and transitions but development is still GUI based and uses outlets like in the blog. A lot of programmers just refuse to use this stuff and just do everything programmatically. new kid on the block is SwiftUI which is a much saner not XML based declarative way of defining UI components like React but is still rough around edges and will likely be for a couple years.

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