Oh man three20. I was freshly hired at my first dev job at a startup as a self-taught rails dev. I like to learn and was open to doing more, so they had me start to take over some of the ios dev, which heavily leveraged three20.

Unless you have the same experience, you can't imagine how difficult it is to get your head around native ios development with this kitchen-sink, highly-opinionated library layered on top. I had no frame of reference for understanding ios, or three20, or even development in general really (I had done some webapps and api servers...). That was the most difficult phase of "this seems like it should be incredibly simple but I'm now a week into trying to figure it out". So frustrating.

I made it out the other end, ultimately by just throwing my hands up and asking for help, then really digging into native ios first so I had a solid frame of reference of what the system was intended/designed to do, and what three20 was doing for/against you.

I had a similar experience with Ruby/Rails actually (not understanding what rails did vs just ruby), and now I recognize I'm falling into that trap immediately when getting into new ecosystems. Now I try to make sure to start from the basics, and layer the complexity on only after I have a frame of reference for understanding the platform.

omg this was 14 years ago now https://github.com/andrewarrow/yammer_iphone

(cue, GnR song 14 years...)

Also props to https://github.com/joehewitt/ it was amazing at the time.

Can you explain for the people not in the know?

oh three20 was an objective-c iphone library named 320 because that was the size of the screen. Created by facebook but everyone started using it until iphones started to come in other sizes!

I recall people dropping three20 long before screen sizes were an issue. I can't speak to all the issues with its design; I think I got to the part where it tried to model navigation similar to Ruby on Rails' routes and gave it a big "Nope."