Re: Why initialize the menubar without Interface Builder

FROM : Uli Kusterer
DATE : Sun Nov 04 13:06:14 2007

Am 04.11.2007 um 02:10 schrieb Erik Buck:
> I admit, that most projects I have directly
> experienced have had ten or fewer software developers
> at any moment in time. There might have been fifty
> developers in the lifetime of an application, but not
> all at once.  Of the ten concurrent developers, the
> usual number of GUI developers is exactly one.


  Oh, wow. That must be tough. We have several people there. Of 
course, we have an interaction designer and a graphics designer that 
collaborate on the actual designs and make sure it's consistent, but 
we have several people who do GUI programmer work, and it's good like 
that. With the amount of GUI work involved in a Mac app, I'd go mad if 
I was the sole GUI developer on an app.

> Uli makes a very valid point!  I think we need a human
> readable and computer merge-able way of viewing the
> target-action, bindings, and layout/nesting details of
> a nib.  This is essential even just to document the
> design of a nib.  It is too difficult to figure out
> how somebody else's nib is put together right now.


  Yeah. XIB was kinda supposed to do that, but someone had the great 
idea of dumping a whole binary NIB in there as well...

> I don't think these problems with IB and nibs raise to
> the level where I would prefer to hard code all
> aspects of a GUI.


  I never said "all aspects", but some of the really neat features, 
like bindings, are just prohibitively opaque in a NIB. So you'd have 
to script those using bindTo:. Trouble is, then you're back to 
Carbon's HIViewFindByID()-technique. And I went to Cocoa exactly to 
avoid this...

Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
http://www.zathras.de