Re: [cocoaheadsau] App UI customisation best practise

[C Diehm]

When I'm skinning an app, I either use UIAppearance controls or NUI. In my view, stylesheeting an app is absolutely the way to go.

https://github.com/tombenner/nui

Hope that helps

@helveticade

On Tuesday, 14 May 2013 at 10:09 AM, Alex M wrote:

What is the best practise way for customising UI widgets in a DRY way using the iOS 5+ UI customisation APIs? Should I create categories, subclass or something else? Are there any good UI libraries that are recommended?

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[Stewart Gleadow]

There was a thread a couple of months about this from memory (I started it, can't remember the dates).

I looked into NUI. It's a nifty tool but the implementation is a complete hack, swizzles galore. I wouldn't touch it for a production app, though I haven't heard of anyone being rejected for using it.

The way NUI specifies styles is a compact CSS-like format. I'd like to see a tool that maps a similar specification to UIAppearance proxies and other custom styles. (started working on one myself, but it's very early days)

- Stew

[Jasper Blues]

I'm all for encapsulating the style in a single, cohesive document. 

At the same time, I see marginal benefit and a good few drawbacks to defining a CSS-like language for this. For example,

• Before you can get refactoring (i.e. renaming, etc) you need to build the support into the IDE. 
• Its a new system you have to learn. . . If its like CSS, but not quite, or a sub-set you still have to learn this. 
• Before you can get code-completion you need to build support into the IDE. . . code completion is a great way to forget the finer details, until you need them. 

My preference would be a descriptive Objective-C API that lets me define all the styles in a single place, and the same time as allowing modularisation. . .(i.e. split sections into methods, etc). 

Jasper Blues

Landline: +63.2.826.2489

Skype: jasperblues

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