I would like to center four buttons horizontally and vertically. Each of the buttons shall get a background image later, so I think it's important that the aspect ratio stays more or less the same, otherwise the pictures won't fit onto the button.
A screenshot of what it should look like:
All buttons have the same size and should take up as much space as available (small margin, 10px or so, not more if possible). I don't know how to set the constraints that the application looks good on all devices (iPhone 5s and iPad 10.5").
The application must not necessarily run in all orientation modes.
How do I have to set the constraints?
This problem can easily be reduced to the problem of making a maximum square centered in its superview. You can do that easily with just four constraints:
The rest — the grid of buttons — just falls into your lap. For example, make my blue view a UIStackView containing a two UIStackViews, and there's your grid. Or you could do it with explicit constraints yourself.
If this app can rotate, you might need two sets of constraints, one for when the width is less than the height, the other for when the height is less than the width. You would then have to swap them in code. But that's another issue, and is not difficult.
Add them to UIStackView, for placing them horisontally use horisontal value for axis property you can customize it with distribution, alignment and other properties of UIStackView.
It's the easiest way
Related
I have an Iceland map which contains 9 different area buttons. Every button has a different size. I want the map can show the same on different devices. I only know to set the central button with horizontally in container and vertically in container. However, other buttons, no matter how I set the constraints, they will be a mess on iphone SE or iPhone Plus. (I use iphone 8 as normal)
Can anyone teach me how to set the constraints for the 8 left buttons? thank you!
The best thing for this is a vertical UIStackView nested with 3 horizontal stacks
MainStackView constraints
centered vertically & horizentally , width & height propotional to screen
then drop 3 stackViews inside it set axis = horizontal and drop 3 Buttons for every inner stack
Note: distribution is fillEqually for all the stacks , spacing = 10
look to this Demo
Something I've done in the past is used a single control as the anchor for all the others.
Basically this means taking the centre button and anchoring it to the middle of the container view (centre horizontally and vertically)
I then constrain the middle/top and bottom controls to it (vertical space and horizontally centred)
From there each control in the row is then constrained against these elements (horizontal spacing and vertically centred)
You might also consider constraining the sizes to the centre control as well, so all the controls share the same size. For me, this means constraining the width of the control to a set value and then applying an aspect ratio to the height. I do this because then I can change the value of the width constraint and ALL the control will change size
Because iPhone 5s, iPhone, iPhone+, iPhone X all share the same "sizing classes", it makes it some what more difficult (as you can't apply traits - but you can do it for iPad and iPhone ;)).
At this point, I would bind the centre controls width constraint (and the height if you need it) to the source code and when the view is loaded, determine the device screen size and make minor adjustments to the constraints values.
If you would prefer a complete "storyboard" solution, you could constraint the width of the centre control to the super view and apply a modifier
Using the "device" templates from the storyboard, layout one a iPhone 5s and iPad Pro
The long and short of it is, you have "options". You might even consider using UIStackView to define the rows, personally I find it easier to constraint the controls to a central anchor point - but that's my experience and your needs might differ
I don't really understand constraints and have tried many different suggestions found online. All they seem to do is bunch everything up on top of one another or do nothing at all.
I have the following IPad application but I want it to work on any size device, mainly a IPod touch.
The page is simply two buttons that I want to remain the same no matter what screen they're on.
Any help on this appreciated.
It helps to think about points of reference that won't change with different screen sizes. Sometimes you want things on, say the top left corner so you just do constraints to the top and the left.
I'll give you two suggestions
Suggestion One
For your case, it seems like you might want to do constraints off centerY since you want them to be in the middle despite the screen size.
So I would make a constraint to "Center Vertically in Container" and then tap on the constraint and adjust it's value to negative or positive, so that way it's always X pixels above or below the centerY.
Now that's not going to be enough. it knows it's Y position but it doesn't know its height, width, or X position. So you need to add enough constraints to satisfy those.
A few examples:
X/Width: Two constraints to leading and trailing on each button OR Center horizontally and fixed width constraint. (again be careful with fixed width constraints since screen sizes can change, sometimes it's what you want though)
Height: Yeah just give it a height constraint in this case.
Note that this means no matter the screen size they'll always have the same gap between them (and maybe different gaps to the other edges).
Suggestion Two
Use a container view, either a stack view (fill, equal spacing, vertical alignment, a spacing value for gap between) or normal view.
You can make the view a fixed height based off the height and spacing between the buttons you want. Then simply center that container view horizontally and vertically on the super view.
Nonsuggestion
There are certainly other ways (like using buffer views with equal heights constraints. So you'd have an invisible view on top, a view in between and a view on bottom. and you'd give those equal heights constraints and align the buttons to the edges of the invisible views surrounding them. As long as you gave the buttons a fixed height this would work for vertical constraints) but I think these two would probably be the best.
I have an app which I've designed in the width:any height:any universal size template in XCode (Swift). Basically, I have a custom cell, with its own uitableviewcell class too, and two labels inside of it which display array data. Anyway, I am struggling to add the correct restraints etc, so that the labels and text inside them display properly on all iOS devices. Even though I have changed the font to be able to go to 0.2 scale, there's still sometimes overlap or text clipped in the label on smaller iOS screens. It's probably a simple thing to resolve. So can anyone help me make this layout look the same, or the equivalent, on all iOS devices and all orientations too please? Here is my design:
The fact that your labels are overlapping each other is probably that you don't have the proper width constraints.
This is what I will do, taking the left label as an example:
add constraints to the left, top, bottom margin
add a width constraint to the parent view and making it 50% of the parent width
You will need to do the similar for the right label replacing the left margin constraint with a right margin one.
Now both the labels only take 50% of the width, then they will not overlap any more guaranteed.
Auto contraints seems like a bit of a chore. I have a bunch of elements in my main view (this is a single-view app) inside Main.storyboard. So imagine a few labels, buttons, controls, etc.
For example, take one label that says "Hello World" that's centered horizontally in the upper portion of the screen.
I need to add the following constraints to make it appear "normal" in my various devices ipad/iphone:
Horizontal Center constraint
Leading Space
Top Space
Trailing Space
It works, but it seems like a lot of work, I don't remember doing this work in the good old days (~3 years ago) with struts and springs. So I need to add all these constraints to each of my other elements too. So if I have 10 elements, I need roughly 10x4=40 contraints? Is this the ideal way to do this?
If it were up to me a view and the elements as I place them in the view and all controls in it would just be stretched relatively to fit the size of the device. An example would be like in photoshop, where we just decide what the overall image looks like and then scale the image to just fit the dimensions that we want. Is this possible in xcode?
Note that my app is just portait only - for iphone/ipad, but looks exactly the same in both (ie same layout for the controls)
You don't need to set that many constraints.
Horizontal center + top space would be enough given your example, or leading, trailing and top space.
If you are setting leading, trailing and horizontal center, you are over-specifying in that axis and possibly giving the auto-layout system contradictory information that will cause problems.
For that specific example: no, you only need a horizontal center and a top space, because UILabels have an intrinsic content size so their width and height is specified by their content and not constraints (unless you want them to be).
You didn't do this work in the good old days because Auto Layout wasn't on iOS then and there was only one particular possible iPhone size at the time: now there are 4. Auto Layout is an essential tool for modern iOS development.
As for controls stretching relatively to the device size, it depends on the control, but in general standard controls maintain the 44 point touch target rule - for example nav bars have gotten wider to accommodate wider phones but they haven't gotten any taller, because the larger screen size should be used to display more content instead of more chrome.
But yes, if you wanted to have controls have particular dimensions based on device size that is definitely possible with Auto Layout.
I have a relatively simple portrait-only UI, laid out in a Storyboard, with items which I want to vertically spread to fill both 3.5 inch and 4 inch screens.
In other words, I want the spacing between the controls to be adjusted so that the UI nicely fills the screen, irrespective of the screen form factor.
This doesn't seem like an unusual thing to want to do, however I just can't get Interface Builder (within Xcode 5) to add the right constraints - I only seem to be able to get it to add fixed vertical space constraints, which do not adjust for different screen sizes.
Does anyone know how to do this without resorting to programmatic UI construction? I've invested a lot of effort in getting the Storyboard-based UI just right.
The solution needs to work on both iOS 6 and 7. Thanks!
How to do this depends on exactly what kind of adjustment you want when the screen size changes. One way to do it to give the top and bottom most views vertical spacing constraints to the top and bottom of the superview, respectively. Add a view, I usually use a UILabel with no text, in between all the views you have stacked vertically, and give them equal heights to one another. Give one of those "spacer" views a fixed height, but edit it so its priority is less than 1000 (which means it's not mandatory that it be satisfied). Then add spacing constraints between each nearest neighbor above and below each "real" view and the "spacers", so that you have all the views from top to bottom connected together by vertical spacing constraints. When the screen size changes, the only thing that can change will be the height of the "spacers", since the priority is less than 1000, and all other constraints are mandatory. My constraints look like this:
The labels each have the standard (8 point) spacing to the "real" views above and below them. The top and bottom views should have whatever spacing you want to the screen edges.
Apple have now posted a document which describes the officially-endorsed approach to solving this problem:
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/userexperience/Conceptual/AutolayoutPG/AutoLayoutbyExample/AutoLayoutbyExample.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010853-CH5-SW8
Summary of the approach: insert spacer views between your controls, which have equal width/height (as applicable) constraints.