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Conclusion
This is a good place to stop for now. You have learned a lot about Interface Builder and how to use it to set the stage—the graphical user interface—for the real work your application does. As you continue through the book, you will add more controls, menus and menu items, and views and windows, and you will learn how to store and retrieve data and use other features of Cocoa to create a complete and useful application.
DocumentationInterface BuilderAs this recipe makes clear, Interface Builder is primarily a graphical user interface design tool. Apple considers consistency of design from application to application to be a hallmark of the Macintosh user experience. It will come as no surprise to you, therefore, to learn that Interface Builder includes features designed to make it easy to conform to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. The HIG, as it is popularly known, is even linked in Interface Builder’s Help menu to deprive you of any excuse for failing to comply. For detailed technical instruction on the use of Interface Builder’s features, read the Interface Builder User Guide. It, too, is linked in Interface Builder’s Help menu, as Interface Builder Help. Much shorter introductions are contained in the “Nib Files” section of the Resource Programming Guide and the “Interface Builder” section of Appendix C of Mac OS X Technology Overview. As always, consult the release notes and other material for information about the latest release of Interface Builder. These include a long series of release notes, Interface Builder 3.0 Release Notes, Interface Builder 3.1 Release Notes, and Interface Builder 3.1.1 Release Notes. As of this writing, there are no Interface Builder 3.2 Release Notes, but watch for them. There are a number of more technical or specialized documents, including the “Preparing Your Nib Files for Localization” section of the Internationalization Programming Topics document. You can even create an Interface Builder interface for your own custom controls, as explained in the Interface Builder Plug-In Programming Guide. |
