Designing Your Cell

When designing a custom cell, I put down my Magic Mouse and reach for a pencil and some (squared) paper. That's what works for me – your approach may differ – but I find that if I start trying to design a cell in Interface Builder, two problems quickly emerge.

Firstly, Interface Builder tends to push me in the direction of “pixel perfection” before I've decided on what the cell is actually going to do. The fact that you can (relatively) easily line things up exactly means it's very tempting to spend your time doing just that, at the expense of thinking about the overall design.

Secondly, I become frustrated by the limitations of Interface Builder quite quickly. It looks like it should have the same level of fine-detailed control over layout as a tool like Photoshop, but it simply doesn't. If laying out designs in Photoshop is precision surgery with a scalpel, then Interface Builder can sometimes feel like painting a brick wall with a broom.