Building the User Interface on "Tiger"

This page is under construction.

If you are using Mac OS X 10.4.x ("Tiger") to build your application, then the Apple tutorial's section on building the UI may be somewhat confusing. Apple's tutorial uses InterfaceBuilder 3.x to show how to build an interface, and there were many interface changes between versions 2.x and 3.x of InterfaceBuilder. In this section we see how to build the UI using InterfaceBuilder 2.x.

Launch InterfaceBuilder

Start by locating Apple's InterfaceBuilder application. If you installed Apple's Developer Tools, InterfaceBuilder should be in the folder "/Developer/Applications/":

NOTE: If you have not installed Apple's Developer Tools, you should do that now. You will not be able to build the CurrencyConverter example without them. The Developer Tools are distributed as an optional install with Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger"). Look for the "XCode Tools" package in the "Optional Installs" folder on the Mac OS 10.4 install disk.

Once you have located InterfaceBuilder, double-click to launch the application. InterfaceBuilder presents a window you can use to choose a template for the nibfile you are going to create.

Make sure the "Application" option is selected in the "Cocoa" section and click the "New" button to create a new nibfile. InterfaceBuilder creates a new application nibfile, but doesn't immediately save it. The Objective-C objects that represent the new application's interface appear in a new project window, called "Untitled":

The intial window and menubar also appear on the screen. The new application's name appears in the menus as "NewApplication". Save the new nibfile into the "currency-converter" folder that you created earlier (on this page). Give the new file the name "CurrencyConverter.nib"

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