On Apr 4, 2014, at 21:21 , Roland King <email@hidden> wrote:
Would be nice to have at least a little bit of customisability in Xcode, perhaps not the full IB plugin again but something.
You’re right, and since IB now has the ability to peer into source code as much as it wants, I guess I could imagine a solution where a user-defined class that implements (say) ‘exposedBindings’ would enable a text field in the IB bindings inspector where a binding name could be explicitly typed, even if the name itself couldn’t be verified at compile time.
OTOH (editorializing), there’s been no technological advancement in bindings since 10.5, and my guess is that they’re an evolutionary dead end, and Apple isn’t going to waste any development resources on enhancements related to them.
Also (editorializing more), bindings are IMO one of a handful of Cocoa technologies/classes that — though useful and even necessary — are so horrible to use (that is, for developers to use) that we’d better off shooting them into the sun and starting over. That list of horrible technologies would also include things like NSController and its offspring, NSCell, NSMatrix, NSCollectionView, NSUndoManager, NSDocument (since about 10.8), NSToolbar, Core Data, and some aspects of KVC/KVO.
Perhaps other people have their own hit lists, but I think what’s common to most of these is that they’re black-box technologies that have an inadequate API contract. That’s a deadly combination.
Interestingly, Apple *did* shoot most of these technologies into the sun, as far as iOS is concerned, even when that meant inventing something new as a replacement. |