Interface Builder
More info
- Creator
- Jean-Marie Hullot
- Released
- 1988
- Owner
- Apple
- Type
- GUI builder
NeXT's tool for drawing interfaces and wiring them to code by dragging lines between objects — saved as finished objects rather than generated code.
Jean-Marie Hullot built the forerunner, SOS Interface, at INRIA in 1986, in Lisp on a Macintosh, and showed it to Steve Jobs. He followed him to NeXT, where the tool shipped with NeXTSTEP in 1988 as Interface Builder. The novelty was not the drawing but the storage. Other tools emitted source code you were then not allowed to touch; Interface Builder archived the live Objective-C objects into a nib file that the program loaded at launch. Interface and code were connected by dragging a line from a button to an object: an outlet was a reference, an action a method call.
Tim Berners-Lee built the first web browser with it in 1990, which is part of why it was finished so quickly. The tool survived OpenStep and Mac OS X largely unchanged, swapped binary nibs for XML xib files in 2008, and gained storyboards for iOS in 2011, the same year it stopped being a separate application and was folded into Xcode. The word outlet still appears in every Swift project.