Advantages and disadvantages of using Storyboarding?

Another disadvantage with Storyboarding not mentioned is that merges can be very difficult if not impossible if there are conflicts.

Update: It also occurred to me that it puts logic in two places. If your segue is not doing the right thing it might be because of an error in prepareForSegue or it might be because you named your segue incorrectly. Doing things programmatically is, in the end, not that hard.


Advantages of Storyboarding

  • It's cool - suave way to design interfaces
  • Use of StoryBoardSegues to identify navigation/modal relationships
  • If your app supports multiple devices, good way to organize different views (by storyboard file rather than naming, etc)
  • Nice for prototyping
  • Prototype UITableViewCell can save time

Disadvantages of Storyboarding

  • It's a runtime feature, so I believe it is only available in iOS 5
  • StoryBoardSegues are kind of rigid in my experience and you may make use of prepareForSegue a lot
  • Like IB, not very friendly with other display engines and toolkits
  • Makes it hard to share designs for a single view or set of views - you have to send all or nothing

These seem kind of superficial, I guess I haven't given it much thought... At first I was gung-ho about story boards, but now I've reverted to IB or even just programatic view configuration... The more I use them, the less I like them, and the more they feel like a gimmick/waste of time.

Edit

I wrote this answer a few years ago. I have left it the same as before for posterity, although some points are likely no longer relevant (ie the fact that it requires iOS 5+).

After some time, my opinion hasn't changed on storyboards. As others have mentioned, they're okay if you are working solo on an app with few views to manage, but they become a real pain with source control & collaboration. In addition, I prefer one-file-one-object, and storyboards obviously bundle stuff together (as does IB, but to a lesser extent).

If I were writing an app meant to be maintained for any serious length of time, I would go with programmatic view configuration over IB, but definitely IB over storyboards.


At the latest WWDC (2013) Apple Devs strongly recommend using storyboard and built in IB stuff to do most of your code for you instead of writing it by hand because you are much more likely to avoid deprecation and take advantage of feature updates via automated conversions.

The lone disadvantage is the difficulty in allowing git collaboration on storyboards, as there will be conflicts on virtually every commit.

If you are a solo programmer, you should always be using storyboards.