🚀 go-pugleaf

Don Yacktman writes
| 
| andrew@cubetech.com (Andrew Loewenstern) writes:
| > [...]
| 
| Yes, this works, but it would also be nice for IB to do some
| type checking for you.  Imagine an alert panel that pops up...
| "This outlet should be connected to an XYZView or a subclass
| of XYZView.  OK ->"  That could be quite nifty.  Then, when
| you need typechecking, it's available and IB helps in the
| process.  It's really annoying when tracking bugs to discover
| that you biffed and connected an outlet to the wrong thing;
| sometimes it's not obvious that you did so, and some outlets
| really only should be connected to certain types of objects.
| This could be a really nice feature in some cases.  I guess
| the question is, really, how often do these cases appear?  It
| may be that it's not often enough to justify the effort of
| implementing this typechecking.  On the other hand, I've
| wished for it many times myself, so....

Has anyone looked at (or, gasp!, even used) the IBConnectors class?  From the  
documentation in Chapter 8 of the General Reference, it is not clear to me  
whether these methods are active when an initial outlet connection is made  
(although they are used in certain cases where a target object is replaced),  
but this class sounds like the answer to Don's musings.

It seems like the new public Interface Builder protocols have left things wide  
open for a third party to come in and subclass all of the standard NeXT objects  
and improve IB for all of us.  Or am I just reading too much into these  
protocols?  (I'll admit that I haven't had much luck making sense out of the  
new Palette support in 3.0)
-- 
Brian Willoughby	Software Design Engineer, BSEE NCSU
BrianW@SoundS.WA.com	Sound Consulting and Signal Processing Software
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