Nick Zitzmann wrote:
FWIW, I can only think of two good reasons not to use IB and some IDE to
make Mac OS X executables:
1. The developer has some sort of handicap that makes use of IB
inconvenient to impossible.
2. The developer is working on yet another cross-platform framework,
such as XUL, Qt, wxWidgets, GNUstep, etc.
Ummmmm....yeah. If you don't want to use IB, you are either handicapped
or you work for Trolltech. Yeah, it can't be anything else.
The majority of people who have not wanted to use them are either
Windows switchers who want to do things the way they've always done
things (Visual Studio has a GUI maker, but it generates code instead of
archives), or Mac OS 7/8/9 switchers who were too proud to be seen using
ResEdit by others :), or people who enjoy making simple things
complicated. They aren't very good reasons, especially for newbies.
Or they might be Java developers, or RealBasic developers who find that
language more friendly than Objective-C, or (like me) primarily Tcl/Tk
developers for whom writing GUI code is so simple and easy that adding
the overhead of a GUI builder is simply overkill, but who need to dip
into Cocoa once in a while to hook into some Mac-specific functionality.
(My project consisted of 200 lines of ObjC code, sans nib file, to
implement two Tcl commands to change an app's Dock icon. Is that making
simple things complicated?)
I think the best advice to the O.P. is this: if you are an Objective-C
developer, and want to develop GUI apps on the Mac using Objective-C as
the main language, then using IB to build the GUI and to manage your
classes is the way to go. If there's a well-documented, well-supported
way to do app development without IB, I'm not aware of it.
But here's another perspective for the O.P.: On the Mac, the whole
world is converging on Cocoa, even the x-plat toolkits. RealBasic will
soon wrap Cocoa. Both Qt and wxWidgets also wrap Cocoa instead of
Carbon, and neither requires a GUI builder. (Qt has a nice one, but also
makes it easy to build a GUI in code.) If you want to build a Mac app in
code, you do have options, especially if you broaden your perspective to
include cross-platform toolkits.
--Kevin
--
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com
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