Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

Figure 25-9. Editing a user interface in Interface Builder
The Interface
CHAPTER 25 MAC OS X DEVELOPMENT: THE TOOLS 459
The nib is your interface, so it should come as no surprise that your interface elements are at the
center of the nib’s contents. When you open your nib in Interface Builder for the first time, you’re
greeted with the same document window you saw when building and running your nascent
application. The window you see in the nib is the same window the user will be greeted with, but
editable.
Double-click the words “Your document contents here” to edit the text field. Type the new
text, “Hello World!” in its place. Since many interface elements have dynamic content that is difficult
to render in edit mode, you can simulate your interface in normal mode by selecting
Simulate Interface from the File menu, or by typing Cmd+R.
This launches your interface in Cocoa Simulator. You can interact with your interface to
make sure it does what you expect when, for example, resizing a window. Resizing the window
in Cocoa Simulator reveals an unexpected problem. The text area seems to be anchored to the
bottom-left corner of the window, rather than doing what we would expect, which is to stay centered.
We’ll fix that in moment. For now, quit Cocoa Simulator by selecting Quit from the file
menu or typing Cmd+Q.
Testing the interface by itself is OK for some tasks, but it doesn’t show how the interface
works with your application. For more complicated testing, you’ll want to actually build and run
your application. There are a few ways to do this. You can save your interface, and then quit
Interface Builder, or switch back to Xcode to build and run, as we did before.
You can also build and run in Xcode from within Interface Builder itself. Save your interface
by selecting Save from the File menu, or typing Cmd+S. Then select Build and Go in Xcode from
the File menu, or type Shift+Cmd+R. This will send a message to Xcode (no doubt using Apple-
Script) to build and run your application, just like you did earlier.
You should see your document window with your new text. You should also notice we still
have that resizing bug. Quit your application in the usual way and return to Interface Builder.
Select the text area with a single click. It’s time to meet the Inspector.