One of the fun things about the Mac going all the way back to the original was the way it stored user interface data for applications inside a separate stream called the “resource fork”, in a format readable by a tool named ResEdit. This allowed users to poke around inside applications and learn how their UIs ticked, and it was also helpful to developers, who could look at Apple's interfaces for examples when trying to figure out how to do something UI-related. In Mac OS X, this tradition continued, with ResEdit replaced by a tool named Interface Builder, and the resource fork replaced by a file called the “nib file” (with NIB standing for NeXTSTeP Interface Builder). Nib files contained even more information than the classic resource forks, and were of great interest to tinkerers and developers.

Enter NibUnlocker. NibUnlocker is an application that attempts to parse a non-editable nib file and output a xib file that Interface Builder or Xcode can edit. The resulting xib files do not contain all the information that was in the original xib file used to create the nib, however, so the xib file created by NibUnlocker will not be a complete replacement for the original. Although they should not be used in a project to compile a new nib file, as doing so may have unpredictable results, xib files made by NibUnlocker can be very useful for examining a nib file and seeing how it is constructed.

Requirements:
OS X 10.6-10.7
Intel