When the iPhone SDK came out, this was what you got. And this was how the first Apple tutorials were. Back then, there was no Interface Builder for iOS. All the views had to be laid out by hand. That's how I wrote my first iOS app. Man, that was tedious. I'm happy there's interface builder now. Though a word of advice: the ugly XML/plist format of interface builder files makes tracking changes or merging very, very difficult.