Re: Programmatic Windows
Re: Programmatic Windows
- Subject: Re: Programmatic Windows
- From: Vince DeMarco <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 13:47:33 -0700
On Wednesday, June 13, 2001, at 04:42 PM, William Moss wrote:
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I really like Interface Builder. Since the release that was bundled in
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the
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Mac OS X box, it's grown leaps and bounds to make it a wonderful and
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usable
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tool for fashioning interface elements. I'd never be able to get the
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Aqua
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guideline distantces right without those "snap-to" guides.
>
>
On the other hand, the main drawback I have with it is like any other
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GUI
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toolkit. It's very hard to document, debug, and integrate changes with
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other programmers and versions of a project. This was a problem with
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Hypercard. This was a problem with FileMaker. This was a problem with
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FaceSpan.
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Yes this is true, but the easiest way around this problem is keep the
nib files small. IE only one window per nib file. This helps performance
and it also makes sure that no 2 developers are working on the same nib
file
at the same time.
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While programmatic interfaces would be nice, what I'd really love is to
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have Interface Builder be able to export and import the NIB file into an
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XML format. A human readable, computer-langauge independent, text file
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that
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lets me catch the brain dead mistakes that I might not see by looking
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with
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the inspector or with outlets or whatever.
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Have I overlooked something? I know that there's a way to get IB to
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generate stub code to instantiate the NIB files, but is there anything
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like
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an XML import or export facility?
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nibtool will generate a text version of the nib file (you can use
FileMerge to diff nib files) but you can't
create a nib file back from the output of nibtool.
So yes there is a XML export facility (sort of XML) but no import.
vince