Interface Builder is a

software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invo ...

application for Apple's

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

. It is part of

Xcode Xcode is Apple's integrated development environment (IDE) for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. It was initially released in late 2003; the latest stable release is version 14.2, released on December 13, ...

(formerly

Project Builder Project Builder was an integrated development environment (IDE) originally developed by NeXT for version 3 of the NeXTSTEP operating system by separating out the code editing parts of Interface Builder into its own application. After Apple Comput ...

), the

Apple Developer Apple Developer (formerly Apple Developer Connection) is Apple Inc.'s website for software development tools, application programming interfaces (APIs), and technical resources. It contains resources to help software developers write software for ...

developer's toolset. Interface Builder allows

Cocoa Cocoa may refer to: Chocolate * Chocolate * ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree * Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao'' * Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter an ...

and

Carbon Carbon () is a chemical element with the symbol C and atomic number 6. It is nonmetallic and tetravalent—its atom making four electrons available to form covalent chemical bonds. It belongs to group 14 of the periodic table. Carbon ma ...

developers to create interfaces for

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

using a

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, ins ...

. The resulting interface is stored as a .nib file, short for ''NeXT Interface Builder,'' or more recently, as an

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

-based .xib file. Interface Builder is descended from the

NeXTSTEP NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of propri ...

development software of the same name. A version of Interface Builder is also used in the development of

OpenStep OpenStep is a defunct object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification for a legacy object-oriented operating system, with the basic goal of offering a NeXTSTEP-like environment on non-NeXTSTEP operating systems. OpenStep wa ...

software, and a very similar tool called Gorm exists for

GNUstep GNUstep is a free software implementation of the Cocoa (formerly OpenStep) Objective-C frameworks, widget toolkit, and application development tools for Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is part of the GNU Project. GNUste ...

. On March 27, 2008, a specialized iPhone version of Interface Builder allowing interface construction for iPhone applications was released with the iPhone SDK Beta 2. Interface Builder was intentionally developed as a separate application, to allow

interaction design Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." Beyond the digital aspect, interaction design is also useful when creating physical (non-digital) produ ...

ers to design interfaces without having to use a code-oriented IDE, but as of Xcode 4, Apple has integrated its functionality directly into Xcode.

History

Interface Builder first made its appearance in 1986 written in

Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispin ...

(for the ExperLisp product by ExperTelligence). It was invented and developed by Jean-Marie Hullot using the object-oriented features in ExperLisp, and deeply integrated with the Macintosh toolbox.

Denison Bollay Denison Bollay (born 1952) is a software engineer working on programming languages and search algorithms, with applications for e-commerce and financial information. History In 1975, Bollay became an early ''quant'' (before the term was invented), ...

took Jean-Marie Hullot to

NeXT Next may refer to: Arts and entertainment Film * ''Next'' (1990 film), an animated short about William Shakespeare * ''Next'' (2007 film), a sci-fi film starring Nicolas Cage * '' Next: A Primer on Urban Painting'', a 2005 documentary film Lit ...

later that year to demonstrate it to

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; ...

. Jobs immediately recognized its value, and started incorporating it into NeXTSTEP, and by 1988 it was part of NeXTSTEP 0.8. It was the first commercial application that allowed interface objects, such as

buttons A button is a fastener that joins two pieces of fabric together by slipping through a loop or by sliding through a buttonhole. In modern clothing and fashion design, buttons are commonly made of plastic but also may be made of metal, wood ...

, menus, and

windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

, to be placed in an interface using a mouse. One notable early use of Interface Builder was the development of the first

WorldWideWeb WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion between the software and the World Wide Web) is the first web browser and web page editor. It was discontinued in 1994. It was the first WYSIWYG HTML editor. The source code was released in ...

web browser by

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profes ...

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gen ...

, made using a NeXT workstation.

Design

Interface Builder provides ''palettes'', or collections, of user interface objects to an

Objective-C Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXT ...

Swift Swift or SWIFT most commonly refers to: * SWIFT, an international organization facilitating transactions between banks ** SWIFT code * Swift (programming language) * Swift (bird), a family of birds It may also refer to: Organizations * SWIFT, ...

developer. These user interface objects contain items like text fields, data tables, sliders, and pop-up menus. Interface Builder's palettes are completely extensible, meaning any developer can develop new objects and add palettes to Interface Builder. To build an interface, a developer simply drags interface objects from the palette onto a window or menu. ''Actions'' (messages) which the objects can emit are connected to ''targets'' in the application's code and ''outlets'' (pointers) declared in the application's code are connected to specific objects. In this way all initialization is done before runtime, both improving performance and streamlining the development process. When Interface Builder was a standalone application, interface designers could ship nib files to developers, who would then drop them into their projects. Interface Builder saves an application's interface as a

bundle Bundle or Bundling may refer to: * Bundling (packaging), the process of using straps to bundle up items Biology * Bundle of His, a collection of heart muscle cells specialized for electrical conduction * Bundle of Kent, an extra conduction path ...

that contains the interface objects and relationships used in the application. These objects are archived (a process also known as

serialization In computing, serialization (or serialisation) is the process of translating a data structure or object state into a format that can be stored (e.g. files in secondary storage devices, data buffers in primary storage devices) or transmitted (e ...

or marshalling in other contexts) into either an

file or a

-style

property list In the macOS, iOS, NeXTSTEP, and GNUstep programming frameworks, property list files are files that store serialized objects. Property list files use the filename extension .plist, and thus are often referred to as p-list files. Property lis ...

file with a extension. Upon running an application, the proper NIB objects are unarchived, connected into the binary of their owning application, and awakened. Unlike almost all other GUI designer systems which generate code to construct the UI (notable exceptions being

Glade Glade may refer to: Computing * Glade Interface Designer, a GUI designer for GTK+ and GNOME Geography *Glade (geography), open area in woodland, synonym for "clearing" **Glade skiing, skiing amongst trees ;Places in the United States * Glade, Kan ...

Embarcadero Technologies Embarcadero Technologies, Inc. is an American computer software company that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports products and services related to software through several product divisions. It was founded in 1993, went public in 2000, ...

Delphi Delphi (; ), in legend previously called Pytho (Πυθώ), in ancient times was a sacred precinct that served as the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient classical world. The orac ...

and

C++Builder C++Builder is a rapid application development (RAD) environment, originally developed by Borland and owned by Embarcadero Technologies (a subsidiary of Idera), for writing programs in the C++ programming language currently targeting Windows (bo ...

, which stream UI objects similarly), NIBs are often referred to as ''freeze dried'' because they contain the archived objects themselves, ready to run. As of Interface Builder version 3, a new file format (with extension .xib) has been added, which is functionally identical to .nib, except it is stored in a flat file, making it more suitable for storage in

revision control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

systems and processing by tools such as

diff In computing, the utility diff is a data comparison tool that computes and displays the differences between the contents of files. Unlike edit distance notions used for other purposes, diff is line-oriented rather than character-oriented, but ...

External links

Apple's Interface Builder description
for Cocoa and Carbon development
Sun's Interface Builder documentation
for OpenStep development (Archive.org)

Action!, the worlds [sic] first dynamic interface builder - 1988
{{GUI builders MacOS programming tools NeXT User interface builders