Re: Why initialize the menubar without Interface Builder
Re: Why initialize the menubar without Interface Builder
- Subject: Re: Why initialize the menubar without Interface Builder
- From: Chris Hanson <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 18:45:45 -0700
On Nov 3, 2007, at 6:10 PM, Erik Buck wrote:
If you have more than three developers who need to
edit a single nib file, you have a serious problem.
This is not always the case. Perhaps two developers want to make non-
overlapping changes to the same user interface. This is perfectly
well accommodated by either writing the code for the user interface
directly (instead of using Interface Builder), or by using a format
that has been designed to be diff-able and merge-able from the ground
up like XAML. You don't even need layout managers or anything like
that, just a way of representing the object graph
This is one of those cases where there really is no trade-off:
Interface Builder *could* support textual nib files that *do* handle
diff and merge straight from SCM tools reasonably well. It just
*doesn't*. No capabilities of the current system would be lost, and
there would be straightforward developer benefit for what are becoming
increasingly common cases.
Of the ten concurrent developers, the
usual number of GUI developers is exactly one.
This has almost never been my experience working on applications in
teams; typically, everyone in the team will work on different aspects
of its human interface. Even modularizing the system into many nib
files doesn't always prevent people from having to make simultaneous
but non-overlapping changes to them.
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 don't think they do either. However, that it's possible to hard-
code everything specified in a nib, and that the hard-coded version is
diff-able and merge-able via textual SCM tools, is a proof that nibs
themselves could be diff-able and merge-able via textual SCM tools.
-- Chris
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