The advantages are:
- More compatible with version control
- Easier to copy/paste menus and menu items between other projects
- Easier to setup menu delegates or obtain pointers to menu items
- We can use symbolic names when setting a menu item’s tag
- More transparent: We can read the declaration in a few minutes, use search, etc.
There are two disadvantage that I can think of:
1. We currently need to use private API to create the Open Recent submenu. Should this become a problem in a future macOS update, we can always create a single Open Recent menu in MainMenu.nib and use that when building our menu.
2. If you make a typo in the menu declaration then the compiler error will often just point to the first line of the declaration rather than the line with the incorrectly declared item. One can comment out sections to narrow it down, if many edits have been made since last compile.
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