Everyone’s reaction when Apple revealed Interface Builder 3 was one of celebration. Everyone’s reaction when Apple gave us Interface Builder 3 was one of mild frustration. Many sources of frustration came from things that needed to be relearnt, or rather bad habits from IB2 that needed to be unlearnt and relearnt. One source of frustration for me though hasn’t been anything to do with something that didn’t make sense in IB2 but that I lived with. No, this was to do with the simple task of navigation between tabs in a tab view.

I use quite a few tab views that don’t have any tabs showing such as in preferences windows where they are switched with the toolbar. In IB2 you navigated between them by selecting a tab view item (ie clicking on any blank space in the tab view) and pressing tab. Simple enough. In IB3 this isn’t the case, and there is no mention of the change anywhere in any release notes or documentation I can find. After much button mashing on my keyboard I’ve figured out how to do this in IB3. First step is to get up to the tab view level, which requires you pressing control-command-up until you see a blue box at the top of where the tab view is located. Now you can navigate between them by using control-command-left/right. Completely obvious!

(0) Comments