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xibless - Get rid of XIBs and XCode
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``xibless`` is a library that generates Objective-C code that builds Cocoa UIs. The goal of this library
is to replace XIBs in XCode and, if you want, get rid of XCode altogether.

With ``xibless``, instead of designing UIs with a WYSIWYG editor, you build them in a Python script,
similarly to what you do when you build Qt UIs without the Designer. For example, a script like this::

    result = Window(200, 200, 330, 110, "Tell me your name!")
    nameLabel = Label(result, text="Name:")
    nameField = TextField(result, text="")
    helloLabel = Label(result, text="")
    button = Button(result, title="Say Hello")

    nameLabel.width = 45
    nameLabel.packToCorner(Pack.UpperLeft)
    nameField.packRelativeTo(nameLabel, Pack.Right, Pack.Middle)
    nameField.fill(Pack.Right)
    helloLabel.packRelativeTo(nameLabel, Pack.Below, Pack.Left)
    helloLabel.fill(Pack.Right)
    button.packRelativeTo(helloLabel, Pack.Below, Pack.Right)
    nameField.setAnchor(Pack.UpperLeft, growX=True)
    helloLabel.setAnchor(Pack.UpperLeft, growX=True)
    button.setAnchor(Pack.UpperRight)

would generate Objective-C code that build a form with a name field, a text label and a button. The
second part of the script places the widgets on the form appropriately.

**Although xibless is written in Python, the Objective-C code it generates has no Python dependency,
so this tool is suitable for any Cocoa developer.**

``xibless`` runs on Python 2.7 and up. This means that if you're on OS X 10.7 or newer, you can use
the built-in Python. Otherwise, you'll have to install a more recent version of Python.

Why xibless?
------------

For many people XCode and its integrated interface builder work fine and to be fair, XCode is a
nice tool. However, it has shortcomings, mostly just annoyances, but still, after a while,
annoyances become... annoying. For example, when a XIB UI reaches a certain level of complexity, you
never know, when doing minor updates, if you mistakenly messed up something else. Because every
modification, however minor it is, changes a big part of the XIB file, you can't tell in the diff
if the modification you've made was exclusively the one you wanted to make. There's also XIB
localization, with its one-xib-copy-per-localization, which is less than optimal but hard to work
around. Anyway, I'm not going to try to convince you. If you don't already want to get rid of XCode
and/or XIBs, you probably don't need ``xibless``.

Installation
------------

You can install ``xibless`` through pip::

    pip install xibless

or by downloading the source package and running::

    python setup.py install


Usage
-----

``xibless`` can be used either from the command line or through Python. To use it from the command
line, you type::

    xibless <source> <dest>

``source`` is the path of the Python module you wrote that describes the UI you want to build.
``dest`` is the path you want your resulting Objective-C file to be written at. To use ``xibless``
directly from Python, the usage is similar::

    import xibless
    xibless.generate(source, dest)

Now, all this does is that it generates UI code. ``xibless`` hasn't, yet, any integrated solution
to let you easily build a XCode-less program. However, what you can do is to look at the ``demos``
folder and base yourself on those demos (which are completely XCode-less) to build your own project.

Early Development
-----------------

``xibless`` is in very early development and there's no API documentation yet. For now, you'll have
to figure that API from the demos and by digging directly in the source. Also, note that this API
could wildly change before v1.0.

Also, the number of rough edges at the moment are incalculable. There are no error message for
invalid UI scripts, so it might be very hard, for now, to figure out why your scripts don't work.
