Let’s say I want to use a UIImagePickerController to take some photos.
UIImagePickerController* controller = [[UIImagePickerController alloc] init];
controller.sourceType =
Ok, I’ve finished typing the = sign on the second line. Now I would like to type the actual source type value that I am assigning. Surely Xcode can help me out with this? I mean, intellisense/content assist/code completion is a pretty basic IDE feature. But Xcode does nothing by default. Ok, fine. I’ll hit Esc to manually invoke autocompletion.
Xcode, in all its wisdom, gives me a completely useless list of dozens or hundreds of irrelevant entries.
Fine, I happen to know that enums generally start with the name of the control. I will manually type in ‘uiimagepickercontrollers’, to finally get a list of the available UIImagePickerControllerSourceTypes. All in all, it’s a horrible user experience.
Now let’s move on to something even worse. It’s time to configure my controller’s media types:
controller.mediaTypes = wtf?
Ok, so mediaTypes is an array of, well, stuff, since Objective-C arrays aren’t strongly typed, as we saw in the previous ‘iOS Pain Points’ entry. So I have no information on how to use this API, and code completion is telling me nothing. No problem, I’ll just look at the Quick Help window in Xcode.
Great, it’s ‘An array’. Thanks, Xcode. Not to worry, though. I’m familiar with the standard mentioned above, where types generally start with the name of their control, so I’ll just look for UIImagePickerControllerMedi… ok, scratch that. Turns out, I actually need to use a constant such as kUTTypeImage, which is declared in a different file. Or to put it another way, it’s literally impossible to use the UIImagePickerController without looking at the documentation to figure out what the allowed values are for what fields. It’s a case study in poor, non-discoverable API design and inadequate IDE integration.
For reference, here’s what using an enum in C# / Visual Studio looks like:
Apple could learn a thing or two from Microsoft here.