Re: Writing Cocoa apps w/o using Interface Builder
Re: Writing Cocoa apps w/o using Interface Builder
- Subject: Re: Writing Cocoa apps w/o using Interface Builder
- From: Bill Bumgarner <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 10:52:21 -0700
On May 30, 2009, at 8:30 AM, colo wrote:
If your making a game or a custom interface you have no option but to
learn how to program an interface without IB
other than creating the first UIView controller in IB it's stupid not
to know how to do it by code.
Unless your just making a normal table based app you have no choice as
my experience learning it has gone about.
That is a bit simplistic and even slightly insulting. There are a
vast number of developers that have made rather awesome applications
without ever subclassing the standard controls, much less hand coding
a UI.
If you are writing a game or a custom interface, you aren't using the
various UI views offered by Interface Builder. You are rolling your
own UI and, thus, IB isn't going to help much.
But neither is learning how to write the code that would be necessary
to generate the IB based interfaces in the first place.
If you are writing a Cocoa or Touch based application *and* you are
using the various NS* and UI* provided classes *and* you are *not*
using Interface Builder, then you are wasting your time reinventing
wheels.
If you are writing a Cocoa or Touch based application *and* your user
interface is entirely custom, often Open GL, then Interface Builder
doesn't offer a huge amount of value to your development process.
Of course, nothing is ever so black/white. There is a continuum:
[Pure NS/UI]
<----------------------------------------------------------------->
[Pure Custom]
IB is more useful the further left on this continuum you are. For
example, if you are writing a heavily 3D Open GL based game that
includes a UI on startup for configuration rendering options and/or
registering for network play and/or setting up a match, you might
choose to save a boatload of time by using IB to layout a bunch of
fields, boxes, and sliders to provide that UI and then use an all
custom approach for the rest of the game UI.
For Cocoa, the usefulness of IB on the above continuum leans
surprisingly far to the right. Cocoa provides the ability to mix
standard Cocoa controls into an Open GL based rendering environment
and you can drop OpenGL view(s) in amongst an otherwise stock standard
set of Cocoa widgets.
As mentioned by someone else, IB can be a great layout tool even in
the all-custom case. You can use IB to layout a bunch of views
relative to each other and then replace said views at runtime.
b.bum
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