Convert NIB Files to Objective-C Code

by oscardelben • 15 years ago

34 18 15 years ago

panic• 15 years ago

Why would you want to do that?

edge173• 15 years ago

because some people don't like having boxes in the middle that they can't look inside of. I started hacking iphone stuff before there was an sdk, and as a result every time I start a new ios project I rip out all the interface builder stuff... the whole thing just doesn't make sense to me.

I'm sure it's a great tool though, clearly with so many apps out there, people are using it.

lordmatty• 15 years ago

Totally agree. IB doesn't make any sense to me either. You end up with some presentation code in one place, and some in another.

Also, what happens if you set all your background colours to white in IB, and then the branding/design people come along and ask you to change to off-white?

pistoriusp• 15 years ago

I felt the same way, but then I took the time to understand exactly what the XIB was doing and now I'm comfortable with it.

Zev3• 15 years ago

As little as I like IB, it being a black box is not one of my complaints. A xib is just an xml file. You can open it up in a text editor and see what happened. You can copy the xib, set an option and diff the two files and clearly see what it did. Dragging lines around is just a different way of setting a target/action pair. Dragging views just sets the frame for you rather than you setting it, etc etc.

Now, if you wanted to argue that IB is bad because XIBs don't merge easily, I might agree with you[1]. Or even that nib loading is slow iOS 3.x[2]. It does make it slightly harder to use custom views, I suppose. But, a lot of the views I make are just existing views combined, not so much custom drawing[3]. And IB excels at that.

1. I'd actually say this is a failing of almost every VCS out there because it doesn't let you lock files. CVS is the only VCS that I know of that lets you do this.

// edit: As masklinn and shaggyfrog point out below, this isn't quite true. Centralized vcs's let you lock files, dvcs's don't. The point is that merge conflicts suck — and with xibs, can't be fixed..

2. UINib on iOS 4 makes nib loading much faster and much less of an issue.

3. Unless I need it to be very, very, very fast. But, I try to avoid this as it makes it harder to change the look around a month from now.

terhechte• 15 years ago

This makes sense if you want to design UIView based list cells (i.e. UITableView Cells) that have to be high performant because you can do some - (id) init magic that is slower in awakeFromNib and you save some allocation calls. I had to do something similar for a Mac app where i effectively rewrote a finished NSView completely in code and gained at least a 30% speed gain afterwards.

headhuntermdk• 15 years ago

Using this tool, how would a developer properly support localization?

if (english) { // 100 LOC } else if (german ) { // 100 LOC } else if (french) { // 100 LOC }

seriously? Might as well use the tools that Apple supports/uses instead of spending time and energy reinventing the wheel

Hagelin• 15 years ago

NSLocalizedString ?

rufo• 15 years ago

You often have to rearrange your UI due to varying lengths of words/phrases across languages, so just swapping out strings isn't enough.

Convert NIB Files to Objective-C Code

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