Open Radar

 
Summary:
iOS 6 brought us many API changes. Many of these were for the better and quite awesome. Some of them, however, are not as beneficial. In particular, iOS 6 deprecates presentModalViewController:animated: and dismissModalViewControllerAnimated: in favor of new APIs introduced in iOS 5, presentViewController:animated:completion: and dismissViewControllerAnimated:completion:.

I would like to strongly protest the deprecation of these APIs and instead ask that they become implicit wrappers for the new APIs and implicitly pass in NULL as the completion parameter, eg:

- (void) presentModalViewController:(UIViewController *) modalViewController animated:(BOOL) animated {
	[self presentViewController:modalViewController animated:animated completion:NULL];
}

and

- (void) dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:(BOOL) animated {
	[self dismissViewControllerAnimated:animated completion:NULL];
}

My reasoning for this request twofold:

1. While having a completion block sounds like it might be useful, I can't actually think of a situation where I would need to use this. I'm not claiming that my lack of imagination means that there is no use-case for this API -- just that it exists only to solve a rare situation. Which leads to..

2. Forcing everyone to have a third parameter that is rarely used introduces a lot code smell and boilerplate code. Code, in general, is evil and prone to have bugs. Less code is better (and one could argue that one job of framework authors is to handle common tasks so that developers don't have to) -- so, don't force developers to write more than they really need!