> It seemed crazy and old school to me to have the UI stuff that IB generates stored in XML - I definitely thought it should generate the same code that you would write to do it programmatically.
The idea behind Interface Builder is that it writes the class instances and their properties using NSCoding, and they're decoded at runtime and assigned to your IBOutlets just as if you had initialized them in code, set their properties, and assigned them to instance variables yourself. XIBs were introduced with OS X Leopard as a text-based way to store the files in source control, but they're still compiled into binary NIBs when the project is built. You're not supposed to hand-edit the XML.
The idea behind Interface Builder is that it writes the class instances and their properties using NSCoding, and they're decoded at runtime and assigned to your IBOutlets just as if you had initialized them in code, set their properties, and assigned them to instance variables yourself. XIBs were introduced with OS X Leopard as a text-based way to store the files in source control, but they're still compiled into binary NIBs when the project is built. You're not supposed to hand-edit the XML.