One More Thing: A Few Great Interface Builder Tips

It never hurts to have a few extra tricks up your sleeve when developing with Interface Builder and Xcode. Here are some favorite IB tricks that I use on a regular basis:

• Selecting from stacked views—You can use the object hierarchy view to drill down into Interface Builder’s view tree. Another way to find and select subviews is by Control-Shift-clicking a view. This exposes all the views layered at that point (see Figure 4-20) and lets you select whichever item you want, regardless of whether it is the top view.

Figure 4-20. Shift-Control-click a view to pop up a view-selection dialog.

• Naming views—Tired of seeing each new item called “View Controller Scene” in your scene list? Give your views more meaningful names. Edit the Interface Builder Identity > Label field. The strings you assign are not used outside of Xcode, but they do help you organize your visual components.