I am wondering if i can achieve this with Xcode's IB auto layout constraints, as currently i am beating my head against a wall, referring to the image below:
I have three views, and want the upper and lower to be proportional to the screen, and have the middle lock x pixels from each. I am sure i can manually do it, but am also sure that somehow the aspect ratio constraint can allow this to happen.
I am pinning the top/bottom view to sides (0), and respective top/botton (o), laying out the view i want in IB's iPad rendering so the proportions look proper, then setting aspect. Logically this makes sense to me, but it isn't working, so i suspect I am making assumptions about the aspect constraint.
Hopefully this is explained well enough to elicit a saving thought or two. thx.
I'm not sure if I understood what you mean correctly, but is that effect below you would like to achieve?
Take a look at the constraints.
Use equal height or width constraints to the superview and set multiplier to the percentage you want it to take. 50% would be .5. To create these in the document outline drag from the child view to the parent view. You will see the option of equal heights or widths. Choose edit on the constraint and change the multiplier from 1 to the desired number. Cheers. Or see answer How to scale height of views and postion of the views relative to the screen size using AutoLayout
Related
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 need my buttons to stay in the same positions for all phones.
I want it to look like this on all iPhones:
But when I switch to a larger size phone it does this, it also looks ugly on smaller phones as well:
That is a VERY broad question, as a lot of iOS UI depends on autolayout. I suggest you work through these tuts at at least AutoLayout. From your screen shots, it looks as if you have set a width constraint on your view with the green background instead of pinning the leading, trailing, top, and bottom to the edges.
Auto layout is, in essence, a system that performs calculations based on constraints. This means that to perform what you want, you need to add constraints to each of your objects so that the compiler knows how you want to resize your UI. But like others have said, that is a very general question. I suggest looking into the topic a bit before asking, so you can narrow down your question and get better answers.
You need to define positions for all your button or views. You need to define atleast 4 constraints for all your view. By adding constraints you tell your views where they should be placed on all screens. You define their positioning with respect to screen by adding constraints.
When you add trailing, from top and width and height constraint you tell that view should be placed in fixed position i.e. x , y and occupy defined space whatever may be screen size.You can opt for fixed width or height. Instead of fixing height and width you can also define leading or trailing constraints for the view. Constraints will adjust views frame according to screen size.
For beginning you can opt for some tutorials available online. You can check Raywanderlich here. Hope it helps.
I've been trying to understand Auto Layout, but keep failing and need help.
In this test project below I wanted to align 4 squares to look good in both portrait and landscape modes on all devices. I need to know what constraints I am doing wrong.
I used views in this case.
In the first step I added equal width/size pins since all the squares were the same size.
Size of the squares were W:250 H:121. The view container was the inferred option
In the second step I added width and height pins (cushions) between the squares.
In the third step I added all the necessary outside constraints from the individual squares to the superview (leading,trailing,top to top layout, bottom to bottom layout).
And finally what my constraints end up doing; they look fine in portrait but look weird/don't show in landscape.
What am I doing wrong? Is it a a size class issue, a constraint issue, am I completely missing certain steps, or something else?
In your 3.5 and 4 inch it doesnt show because you fixed the constraint to the bottom of your superView, that constraint's constant value alone is higher than the screen itself, forcing your views's height become 0 (or very small on bigger 5.5 screen like in your screenshot), for fixing this, try use less the CONSTANT value, instead, make the constant become 0, and change the Multiplier value on those you want to make it scale with the super view (in your case is the constraint to bottom)
Another option is change the priority of the bottom constraint to lower, and give one of the view a height constraint (Relation set to either equal or greater than or equal) and it will work
I've used multipliers in my constraints, to size my views. However in my constraints for position I've used values, which I change for different sizing classes.
However using regular / regular sizing classes for iPad Pro it's positions values aren't big enough, but for other iPads it's fine.
I seriously don't have to add positioning views with multipliers to provide percentage spaces for all my views as well do I?
Right, you don't have to use multipliers because Any value other than
1 creates a proportional constraint. For a Width attribute, for
example, the width of the first item can be set to be twice the
width of the second item
First thing I like to say that the resolution of ipad and ipad pro have abundant difference so in case of yours to add positioning views I just suggest you to use size class and use of priority, constant and relation (less than or equal, equal, greater than or equal) if necessary.
Hope, It'll helpful for you...
What we're after is to set the margin between the top of the screen and the top of the subview with relation to the size of the screen. This means the constraint must be related to the superview's height.
Trying to set the distance between the two views (In the traditional sense) is actually a bad idea in this case. Instead, try this.
Add a constraint to center your view vertically in the superview. Now, open up the constraint in the size inspector (The right toolbar).
If you set the multiplier to 0.01 (0 just puts it back in the center of the screen), your view will go past the top of the screen. Change the first item from Center Y to Top. Now your view will be at the top!
From here, you can change the constant to move your view down a fixed amount and change the multiplier to move your view down further proportionally to the screen's height. The formula would look like
subViewYPosition = constant + (superviewHeight * multiplier)
You will need to adjust the constant and multiplier to suit your needs, but I believe this is a good solution to the problem.
An example of this is shown below.
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.