Re: Bypassing Interface Builder

FROM : Stefan Werner
DATE : Wed May 14 18:46:18 2008

On May 14, 2008, at 9:13 AM, glenn andreas wrote:
> Also, when you support localization, you really need to use NIBs. 
> Different languages can easily require different layouts, due to 
> string lengths (German UI text tends to be _much_ longer often 
> requiring serious re-do of layouts), cultural norms (Left to Right 
> vs Right to Left), etc....  If you do everything in code, you're 
> going to have to figure out what the current locale/language is, map 
> it to what languages you support, and then do your layout from 
> there.  By using NIBs, you can just have a different layout with a 
> differently localization and the system takes care of everything else.


Actually, there are many frameworks that do dynamic layouts with 
widgets that will automatically resize to fit their labels (Java Swing 
for example). I'm not aware of an easy way of doing this in native 
Cocoa, but it should be possible do have proper localization support 
without having separate NIB files for each language. I'm expecting 
that Qt/Cocoa and wxCocoa will deliver such implementations.

-Stefan