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Comment by nayefc | Hacker News Reader

From all the app code generators I've seen and used, the experience is absolutely horrendous. Memory leaks, does not five you full access into the API etc... It's a lot easier to suck it up and learn Objective-C than having to deal with these tools.

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Out of curiosity have you used or seen Xamarin? I've heard a lot of hype and talked to fairly experienced people who say it doesn't add too much in size or performance cost.

I like Xamarin's products. I am currently involved in a Xamarin.Mac project and I definitely prefer coding with C# over Obj-C. It's a very nice combo of having things like LINQ, nullables, properties, etc and yet you're still truly coding against/with Cocoa. You can't use Xamarin's products without first having at least a working knowledge of Apple's tech.

My reservation is the cost. I bought MonoTouch when it was first released and wrote a game for the iPad with it[1]. If I wanted to release that game now though, I'd have to re-buy MonoTouch, which doesn't sit well with me. But if you're not a hobbyest then the cost is pretty irrelevant IMO.

[1]https://github.com/city41/optix

What would be cool is if someone who was a REALLY good objective C developer made a tool... So that the generated code was of the highest quality.

Part of me wants to and most of me doesn't haha. The problem is that design patterns change pretty frequently. I mean I cringed when I saw action sheets and their table views in the video. I'm working on a "Bootstrap for iOS" right now but the project is pretty much on the back burner due to some other iOS stuff I'm working on. I've released the colors part of what I was going to include (shameless plug: https://github.com/bennyguitar/Colours-for-iOS) and I'm going to release another couple classes soon that make some UI stuff a lot easier and streamlined.

Looks like a good start. I'll be watching this repo.

The thing I find funny about their example is that alot of it is easily achived by storyboards anyway. I find that people choose these solutions thinking it will help them with complex requierments or ideas they have where in fact the application should or can only be used for applications for simple ideas and requierments.

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