Open Radar

 
XIB files have become more and more complex. Not only can they store view layouts and outlet connections, we now have behaviour in the form of bindings, formatters, user-defined runtime attributes and layout constraints.

When I find myself building a complex, inter-related set of constraints, or adding additional containers to make it easier to arrange things with them, I often wish I could include labels or descriptions that tell other developers (or future me) why I added these containers, or what interrelations to watch out for.

It would be neat if there was a mechanism that permits that in Xcode's Interface Builder. I could see it as something similar to the post-it notes you can add to a slide in Keynote, which don't show up when the keynote file is presented.

It'd also be useful if they could be attached to a particular view (or window, or constraint), so that if that is moved or copied the notes still stay near it, not unlike the connecting lines in OmniGraffle, which adjust themselves when you move the boxes.

These notes would need the following features:

• Like comments, they should get stripped from the final product and only be in the XIB, not in the compiled NIB, to avoid leaking proprietary information.
• Should be attachable to constraints, views, and any other object that can be referenced or connected to in the XIB, including first responder.
• It should be possible to hide all notes for cases where they are in the way of the mouse (or visually) when editing.
• It should be possible to be made aware of all notes existing in a XIB. Maybe it would just be a list of all notes in the file, or maybe an icon "there are currently invisible notes attached to this object" or an arrow on the canvas hinting at notes off-screen.

Bonus points for:

• text styles and maybe even images in notes
• An indicator what object a note is associated with
• Keeping notes in the XML of the XIB near the XML for the object they're attached/close to, so they are easy to read and see in diffs
• differently-colored post-its

This issue may be a duplicate of/expansion on rdar://6586288 or rdar://9724380

===== Added 3 hours later: =====

I just found out that Xcode 3 apparently showed the "Notes" field's contents as help tags over objects. If that functionality was restored, that would actually be a useful quick fix for that issue, maybe together with a more obvious label for that field in the inspector.

Can't come up with something snappy, but maybe "Documentation Tool Tip", "Design-Time Tool Tip" or "Design Canvas Tool Tip" or something? (Avoiding "Help tag" here as 'help' feels misleading to me, but then so does 'Documentation' given Xcode has both help and a documentation viewer)

Anyway, I never even knew that these notes showed up on the canvas when you moused over, or I would have actually used them.