Nibware (canonical spelling) is the name given to any application that is implemented primarily by wiring objects together in InterfaceBuilder rather than by writing code. It’s not entirely derisive; it’s often very useful to throw together a nibware application as a demonstration, when learning new technologies, or when investigating bugs and interactions you don’t entirely understand.

On the other hand, the scale of what can be accomplished in nibware (especially thanks to technologies like CocoaBindings and CoreData) can cause some new developers to resist learning the Cocoa frameworks in depth, and to always request InterfaceBuilder-oriented or InterfaceBuilder-only solutions to whatever problems they’re having or whatever design they’re trying to implement.