I'm back from the sidetrack, at least for now. Game prototypes and MySpace widgets were taking up my time, and probably a bit later will again, but today I'm figuring out iPhone stuff again.
I really still don't understand the relationship between the Interface Builder and code. If I make a view in Interface Builder and add the XIB file to my project and build the project, did it now create a class definition for it automatically? How can I even find out? I feel frustrated that magical things are happening in the background, code is apparently created that I have no awareness of. But this feeling is familiar, I know it will be replaced by understanding if I just continue on this long enough. Things will click into place, and then it will be a breeze to create things. That'll keep me motivated to continue on.
What I want to accomplish is simple. I want a button in the main screen, that when pressed slides out another view which is also constructed in the Interface Builder. But to do this, somehow I need to reference this other view from code, and I don't know how it appears there. I see at least these options of how this might work:
a) Perhaps if I just add a XIB file to a project, Xcode does something magical behind the scenes that results in a class definition being available to all code, which I then have to instantiate. This seems unlikely somehow.
b) Perhaps adding a XIB file to a project causes objects defined in the file to be instantiated. This seems likely, I remember reading that XIB files are kind of frozen object relationships. But when they are thawed, where are they?
c) Adding a XIB file to a project is not enough by itself, but you need to create your own proxy classes in Xcode to be able to reference them. But this wouldn't solve the issue previously mentioned. Even if I know the class names, I still need to reference the thawed objects.
Gimme the thawed objects!
