On 14.07.2008, at 14:53, Bill Royds wrote:
Are there any good tools for porting Application menus and forms
from other windowing systems (such as MS Windows or X or even
Carbon) to Cocoa nibs? I have a number of applications that I would
like to port, but redesigning the form or menu layout completely
seems to be rather pointless. I am quite willing to rewrite all the
code that interacts with the forms or menus, but I am not a graphic
designer so form layout is better left to experts who have already
done it.
All I really want is a tool that will put objects without any
connections or code on a form or menu by parsing a MS .RC file, for
example
Being able to do this would lead to an large increase in the number
of Macintosh applications available.
I'm not aware of an existing tool, though I've said in other similar
threads (some on Carbon-Dev) that it should be possible to write code
that does this, as long as the source format is known. Xcode 3 has the
XML-based XIB format. You could create a few simple test files, see
what XML it generates for the various objects, see how the sizes of
these objects differ from their Windows counterparts*, and then write
code that reads the RC files and outputs the text needed for an XIB.
(Ignore the huge blob of binary data at the bottom of the XIB,
that's just a binary, runnable version of the stuff above it)
*) Note that that is actually the hard part -- control sizes may
differ so substantially, that it may be impossible to do a 1-on-1
translation of your UI automatically without making it look horrible.
You may need a graphics designer with a good eye for layout to
determine how these rects correspond. IMHO, most times you'll have to
manually fix up things anyway, so you might as well go and recreate
the UI and let IB's snap-to-guidelines do the job of initial layout.
Cheers,
-- Uli Kusterer
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
http://www.zathras.de
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