Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 4th Jun 2008 09:22 UTC, submitted by tyrione
Scott Stevenson at InformIT interviews Aaron Hillegass about the new edition of Aaron's "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" book, programmers' fear of the NIB file, and why there aren't more Macs in corporate America. There are some real gems in this interview, so read on.
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RE[2]: Fear of the NIB file
by evangs on Wed 4th Jun 2008 20:22
in reply to "RE: Fear of the NIB file"
Member since:2005-07-07
I read this part of the interview in amazement - what a nightmare, a monolithic gob of stuff that describes your entire user interface in one file? I had no idea such poor design choices had survived this long. How the hell does a .NIB file work with version control systems?
You don't develop with NIBs, as those files are for deployment only. You use .xib files when developing and these are text based NIB files, which integrate easily with version control software.
Read more about it at http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/...
RE[2]: Fear of the NIB file
by SHatfield on Thu 5th Jun 2008 13:25
in reply to "RE: Fear of the NIB file"
Member since:2006-12-23
...what a nightmare, a monolithic gob of stuff that describes your entire user interface in one file?...
That's not the case at all. You can have multiple NIB files... one for the menu, one for the main window, another for preferences, another for secondary windows, etc.
I agree with you that it is weird to have your UI in binary files... but version control just keeps the files for you, and if you need to revert back to previous versions, you just go get the older NIB file from the history in the repository.
Something to understand is that if you made a mistake with your design of 1 part of your NIB file, it is often faster and easier just to fix the mistake than go to the repository. Interface Builder makes writing Mac OS X apps very fast and easy!
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Member since:
2006-03-18
I read this part of the interview in amazement - what a nightmare, a monolithic gob of stuff that describes your entire user interface in one file? I had no idea such poor design choices had survived this long. How the hell does a .NIB file work with version control systems?
It might be a of a lot easier to learn to love the .NIB if you are going to develop for the Mac, but there simply has to be a better way to solve this problem. MS's XAML and Adobe's MXML come to mind.
One of the primary drivers for Adobe's choice of the MXML format for user interface layout description was the fact that the monolithic blobs their older products produced weren't human readable, and were a nightmare to version control.