KATI

I’m still using IB2 at work, but we’ll be making the move to Leopard over the next few months. I feel a slight pang of pre-nostalgia when I think about trading in Interface Builder 2 and its historical code base for its shiny new successor, Interface Builder 3. I know that IB3 is going to be a million times more usable and that it was past time for a real change in the world of IB, but those who know me know that I tend to pine for the old before embracing the new. I’ll pine now and get it over with.

I remember the exact moment when I realized how amazingly cool Interface Builder is. I was making a custom palette for some GUI classes, implementing the drawing and mouse event handling methods for when they would be running in IB. While I was typing, it struck me that what I was doing was a little strange. I was giving these classes a second, meta life only to be invoked by Interface Builder. All of the views and controls in Cocoa have this second IB life. When we drop them into a window, they draw preview versions of themselves and sometimes even respond to our mouse and key events (if we poke around in just the right spots). Interface Builder takes over from there. It guides us as we drag the views around, adjust their sizes and much more. Wow, what a clever and useful application. Who thought of this? They’re a genius.

Jean-Marie Hullot and his Interface Builder

Interface Builder was developed by Jean-Marie Hullot, pictured above during his days at NeXT. There is little written about him or his invention on the internet except that Hullot wrote the original version in some Lispy language and that it was originally called ‘SOS Interface’. Steve Jobs loved it, kidnapped Hullot and Tim Berners-Lee used it to make the first web browser, WorldWideWeb. Now we all use Interface Builder.

While I was scouring the net for information about Hullot, I came across a PDF excerpt from the book “How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web” by James Gillies and Robert Cailliau. There is a short section about Hullot and Interface Builder, titled “Monsieur Hullot’s holiday’. This is my favorite bit (emphasis is mine):

Hullot was using a Macintosh, and like many developers, he rapidly found that although the Mac’s GUI might have been brilliant, it was a pig of a machine to write applications on. ‘When the Macintosh was invented,’ he explains, ’suddenly, compared to what you had to do before, you had to add at least 60 or 70 percent of your time to make the user interface.’ Before the Macintosh, the interface was pretty basic-you would just type a line of text and the computer would respond with successive lines scrolling up the screen-but that meant that programmers didn’t have to worry about it. All the windows and menus that came with the Mac were great for the people who used the end applications, but for the people who had to write them they were a nightmare. Each time they wanted a menu or a window in their application, they had to program it in from scratch. Hullot’s big idea was to turn the problem into a simple question of drawing lines on the screen. He made a palette of objects for things like menu items and windows. Then to build the outline of an application you would simply take objects from the palette and draw lines between them. So, for example, you could pick up a menu object, and then by drawing lines from the other objects like ‘Open’ or ‘Print’, you would put those functions in the menu.

Hullot called his invention Interface Builder. It was a powerful tool that, like Smalltalk, put the power of objects at the developer’s disposal.

Kind of amazing, huh? These days, it’s easy to take things like windows and menus for granted. They come free with our development tools. On top of that, the responder chain and target/action mechanisms make it simple to dynamically link buttons and menu items to actions. If your app has a simple interface, there’s very little code that needs to be written for UI development. Even if your interface is complex, much of the burden is lifted by Hullot’s technology. Thank you, Jean-Marie.

The book goes on to describe Hullot and Jobs’ first meeting and the rest is history. In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a video of Steve Jobs presenting some applications on NeXTSTEP. He shows Interface Builder at 23:40. Funny how little has changed until now.

So, I’ll say goodbye to Inteface Builder 2 and end my pining now. Bye bye, IB2. Your interface was really strange and awkward but you were really cool and useful. I’ll miss palettes (not really, actually).