Following the acquisition of Yum by our company we decided to develop the new version for Leopard only. As part of this move we wanted to upgrade the existing NIB files to XIB format since the XIB format is more subversion-friendly¹.

For those of you who find themselves in the same position here’s how to upgrade a single NIB file to XIB format. Open Terminal and run:

$ ibtool --upgrade MainMenu.nib

Yep, that’s it. If you have a set of NIB files then you can batch upgrade them to XIB like this:

$ for nib in `ls -d *.nib`; do ibtool --upgrade $nib; done

¹ XIBs are text-based XML files, while NIB files are in binary format

Tags: cocoa, xcode, nib, xib, subversion