Building Interfaces

Now you’re going to create the user interface for Quiz using Xcode’s visual tool for building interfaces. In many GUI builders on other platforms, you describe what you want an application to look like and then press a button to generate a bunch of code. Xcode’s interface builder is different. It is an object editor: you create and configure view objects and then save them into an archive. The archive is a XIB (pronounced zib) file.

A XIB file is an XML representation of the archived objects. When you build a project, the XIB file is compiled into a NIB file. Developers work with XIB files (they’re easier to edit), and applications use NIB files (they’re smaller and easier to parse). However, most iOS developers use the ...

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