Introduction to Unarchiving Interface Objects With Interface Builder Services

Interface Builder is an Apple development tool that makes it easy to create application interfaces by dragging objects (buttons, windows, menus, text boxes, controls, and so forth) from a palette. The standard palettes for Carbon—Menu, Text, Controls, Enhanced Controls, and Data Views—provide a variety of ready-made objects.

When you create your application’s user interface, Interface Builder archives the elements of the interface as objects. When your application is ready to use the interface objects, you need to call functions from Interface Builder Services to unarchive the objects. If you aren’t using Interface Builder to create your application’s user interface, then you don’t need to use Interface Builder Services.