Learning Carbon

Chapter 5. Interface Builder: Toolsand Controls

Interface Builder provides palettes rich with controls and other items—such as push buttons, radio buttons, text labels, graphics, data browsers, and menus—you can add to your application’s interface. Because Interface Builder uses graphical tools, it’s fairly easy to create and lay out items in a window. The tricky part is to associate code with the controls so that when the user manipulates a control, the application responds.

You’ll use Interface Builder in this chapter to:

• Take a close look at the objects you can add to an interface using Interface Builder palettes

• Check out the tools you can use to align interface objects in a window

• Add controls and other objects to the main window of the Moon Travel Planner application

Then, in Chapter 6, you’ll see how to write code that makes the controls spring to life.

Palettes and Layout Tools

To create an interface, you simply select the objects you want in the interface from one of Interface Builder’s palettes, drag them to the appropriate location (a window, a menu, the desktop), and make sure the objects are arranged aesthetically, using Inside Mac OS X: Aqua Human Interface Guidelines as a guide. The guidelines are in Carbon Help (available in the Project Builder Help menu). For static objects, the job of adding them to the interface is done. For dynamic objects, you’ll need to do a few more things.

Static objects include such things as a separator line in a menu, a text label, and ...