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 objects, like windows, buttons, and labels, 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 manipulate XIB files (they’re easier to work with), and applications use NIB files (they’re smaller and easier to parse). However, most iOS developers use the words XIB and NIB interchangeably.
When you build an application, the ...
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