Xcode / Interface Builder - better workflow from designer to coder?

Question

Were dealing with some pretty custom UI elements while building our OSX / Cocoa and iPhone / IPad apps. I was wondering if anyone has good recommendations or tricks for getting a better workflow between UI designers and coders while using Xcode / Interface Builder?

It seems that many things require programmatic settings with UI editing in Cocoa... if you stray from the pre-built UI elements then you can't really easily drag-drop build a UI... instead we end up handing off a design doc ( photoshop/illustrator ) and then the poor developer has to deal with recreating this masterpiece in code or by using interface builder - usually a combination of both.

This work flow is leading us to not so great results and we have to re-iterate around the UI elements to get them to work better.

We love CSS and / or Flash designer to developer workflow where the UI could look exactly as it should and the hand off to developer was more seamless.

Is there anyone out there who has some tricks - or insights into getting better workflow when using tools like Xcode / Interface Builder and doing Cocoa apps?

Answer 1

It sounds like you need to create Interface Builder plug-ins for your custom UI components. This will allow your designers to use your actual controls directly in Interface Builder, just like they use the built-in controls.

The documentation on how to build an Interface Builder plug-in is here.

An excellent example of how to implement Interface Builder plug-ins is Brandon Walkin's BWToolKit. The source code is here, it's probably worth having a look at it.