Interface Builder

Working with an application framework has a few parts - there is the first staggering steps of familiarity and the kind of awkwardness you have because of the difference between what you knew before and what you are looking at. Then there is the familiarity when you know more-or-less how to do what you did before and then there is that time a while later when you sort of "get it". This part is the most exciting part as that is when you can work with the flow and get the benefits of the good current.

I think have had something of a slow burn Eureka moment with interface builder. It goes like this - any class member that is declared with the magic IBOutlet in front of it can be connected up in interface builder. It is difficult to kick off in Cocoa (I started with Aaron Hillegass' book) without seeing that this is the way you connect up views and controllers - but you can connect up other things as well. If you have a table and you need to deal with the columns you can do it in two ways. You can give each column an Identifier and loop through the columns until you find the column that you want - or you can pick out the columns you want, add them to your controller with a IBOutlet - and hook them up in Interface builder. The anything part of this is quite powerful - if you need to set attributes on the NSCell derivative that powers the drawing of your column - you can hook this up as well - and so it goes on.