Build iPhone GUI's with out using interface builder?

I'm a totally blind developer who would like to do iPhone development. From what I've heard most of Xcode is accessible with voiceover, the screen reader built into the Mac. My understanding is that the interface builder is mostly to completely inaccessible for blind users. Assuming I can not use interface builder is there an 开发者_Python百科alternative way of creating simple to moderately complex user interfaces? I really don't want to spend $600 on a Mac to find out that it will be nothing more then a paper weight for me.

You don't necessarily need Interface Builder. In fact, some friends who work at Apple say they mostly code the interface. If you can code so far, i'm sure you can code the interface as well.

I'm also a blind developer. Over Christmas I purchased a second hand Mac, and spent 2 weeks on exactly this.

It was certainly possible to develop a complete app without Interface Builder. I used tricks like setting the text in a label, sizing the label, and then programatically calculating the absolute position for the next control by adding some space between controls.

Probably like yourself, I've always wanted to create things myself as it's more fun, and you can experiment more quickly. There's also a certain amount of pride - if you can do it yourself, who needs to hire help.

But what I realised is that my UI was pretty functional, but not at all esthetically pleasing. Most iPhone apps don't just have UI controls on a plain background - there's often a lot of colorful icons and pretty backgrounds involved.

The deal braker for me, personally, was reading the Apple guidelines and seeing that you need icons which conform to some pretty stringent guidelines, in at least two different sizes. The application icon is important as this is much of how people choose whether to download something.

So, if I have to hire a designer to make my icons, I may as well get them to lay out the UI.

Ideally, Interface Builder would be accessible enough to drag controls onto a view (not possible today), and bind them to code. We could then develop an application with no regard for how the controls were layed out, hire a designer, let them do whatever they want with the xib and our code would continue working.

Just my thoughts based on personal experience - there are many resources for learning to create UIs without IB if that's the route you choose.

Interface builder is provided as one way to design user interfaces, but it does not do anything that can't also be done in code. It's a way of building object archives containing (mostly) user interface objects, which can be un-archived and used at run time. But the same objects and properties could be set up in Objective-C and would work just as well.

Apple usually does a better job with accessibility. If Interface Builder is not accessible, I suggest filing a bug at http://bugreport.apple.com/ about it.