Open Radar

 
The current API design makes it impossible to customize newly created UICollectionViewCell programmatically. I mean ONLY customize once in the whole lifetime of UICollectionViewCell, not every time when using it. In contrast, this can be done for UITableViewCell in code like this:
- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    TaskCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:@"TaskCell"];
	if (cell == nil) {
		cell = [[TaskCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleSubtitle reuseIdentifier:@"TaskCell"];
                // Initial customization of TaskCell that can not be done in its init method.
		cell.delegate = self;                
	}
	[self configureCell:cell atIndexPath:indexPath];
    return cell;
}

So I suggest we should have similar API for UICollectionView and UICollectionViewCell.