OK, let's say you're making an iOS app. And it's new so you go to use storyboards because they are awesome and you can target iOS 5.x. Swell. And you're going to use UITableViews and storyboards have that hot new prototype thing where you can lay out your cell right there in the UITableView and you're guaranteed you'll always get a cell from dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier. Awesome! Well not so fast partner. Go read this Radar and this Radar. Yeah, that sucks. Short version is that works fantastically unless your user has turned on VoiceOver, at which point you don't get a cell at all. The stub code Xcode generates at that point will create a generic UITableViewCell with none of your custom layout. If you're lucky you'll get a blank cell. If you're unlucky your code assumed it got a custom cell type and crashes on some property access or method call. So what do you need to do? You have to old school it and just ignore the new layout feature. You can't require your users to turn off VoiceOver, that's not reasonable. You can leave the prototypes in and they will work in the VoiceOver off case but as far as I can tell there is no way to load a prototype cell from a storyboard. I suspect that you might just be able to rummage around in the nib and find a prototype but I don't see a proper way to do that. In the VoiceOver case you have to provide code that will load a cell from a nib file. You can leave the prototype cells in and that will work in the non-VoiceOver case but now you've got two cell prototypes and that's a bad idea. I do recommend leaving the call to dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier in place though. Even with VoiceOver on the table can recycle old cells so if you do all of the cell identifier stuff then after a while your view can get a working set of cells that it just reuses on a scroll. Here's a code snippet that rolls this all up. It's not revolutionary but it gets the job done.

    TripTableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];

    // That call is supposed to always work, but it doesn't if the user has VoiceOver on. If they do, we'll engage le hack below

    if (cell == nil) {

        [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"TripTableViewCell" owner:self options:nil];

        // The above will load our blankCell field with a new TripTableViewCell.

        cell = blankCell;

With this code you make a nib that contains your custom cell. Then in the view controller you make an IBOutlet like so:

@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet TripTableViewCell* blankCell;

In the nib you set the File's Owner to the controller and connect blankCell to the cell. Like I said, nothing shocking here just some old-school-ness in the new storyboard world …