Pre-noob question: what do you mean by "NSFooView"? Googling for it revealed almost nothing, so I take it that you made up the term as a stand-in for some general case. Yes? If so, does NS mean something? Even something that is just a joke or related only to your example? And are you using "Foo" as a reference to the general stand-in phrases "foobar" and "foo = bar"? These questions are sincere, and if you get a chance to set me straight I would seriously appreciate it.
NS is the prefix for Cocoa classes on OS X. It dates back to NextStep. NSFooView is a stand-in for various subclasses of NSView that are the basic UI components in Cocoa. If you open an OS X nib (see below) in Xcode and select "Data Views" or "Layout Views" you'll have a choice of NSView subclasses to add to your UI: NSTableView, NSOutlineView, NSSplitView, and so on. Custom UI components usually subclass NSView.
A nib is a file created by Interface Builder that contains serialized objects that can be reconstituted at runtime. An xib is an XML file that compiles to a nib. An xib is somewhat human-readable and (if you keep the target platform exactly the same) can be somewhat usefully diffed as you modify the interface. I'd like to explain more, but my lack of understanding of the precise nature and use of nibs is part of what makes me a noob.
Thank you. Understanding what abbreviations stand for has always been an obsession of mine, and knowing the origin of "NS" may actually make learning this stuff much easier for me. I really appreciate your taking the time.
Also, because Objective-C doesn't support namespaces like C++, the prefixes sort of serve as a namespace and are there to prevent naming collisions. It's only a convention though, not a requirement.
