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From: ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Interface Builder
Message-ID: <12828@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 15 Nov 89 15:54:09 GMT
References: <770001@hpvcfs1.HP.COM> <680016@hpcuhc.HP.COM>
Reply-To: ali@Polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer)
Organization: .
Lines: 31

In article <680016@hpcuhc.HP.COM> Edward McClanahan writes:
>Steve Miller writes:
>>  ..., one concern that I have is when you finally build you interface and
>> then you add all of you custom code to do the special things you program is
>> ment to do, can you go back to IB and change things without any grief.
>Unfortunately, the answer is NO (or, was 'no').  Apparently, NeXT sees IB as
>a "prototyper" and "initial implementation generator" and NOT as an Interface
>Modifier. 

That's not correct; NeXT sees Interface Builder as a tool that lets
you create and then modify the user interfaces of applications with
equal ease at any time during the development.  As I mentioned in an
earlier message, IB does not generate any code at all for the
interface, instead, it generates archive files that can be modified at
any time with IB.  One of the things you do when editing the UI through
Interface Builder is to specify the object to be notified when an
button is pressed (or a menu item is selected, etc) and specify what
message is to be sent.  The UI objects are instantiated and the connections
between them and their targets are made when the archive file 
is read into the application (at runtime).

The only time you fall into the problem you mention is when you use
IB to generate ("unparse") skeleton interface/implementation files
for your custom classes.  (I talked about this in somewhat more detail
in an earlier message.)  After the first time you generate these files,
if you edit them, it's not easy to use IB to add to them.  So instead
you end up editing the actual files and using IB's "parse" function to load 
the class descriptions back into IB.  Not a big problem, and certainly not
one that prevents you from editing/changing your user interface over and over.

Ali