storyboard constraints (Xcode) - ios

I'm new to programming and I'm trying to work with Xcode. I have no experience. I'm trying to make an app with Xcode. I'm done with the code, the only issue i have is with the storyboard constraints. I need some one who can help me to set them up.
So, i have 28 buttons as you can see in the picture, I want to keep the size of 65x65 pixels. that means that the distance between them should vary in different device sizes(4inch, 4.7inch and 5.5inch). i also should mention that i want it to be only in portrait view and only for iPhone.i hope someone can help because I'm to noob for this, I've searched a lot on the internet but I'm not able to do it.

UIStackView (iOS 9+)
UIStackView was introduced in iOS 9, which is very useful in your case.
Edit: Before getting started, make sure to have size classes to be w Any, h Any, this will make thing easier.
To use this, search UIStackView in your utility panel.
Drag an drop a Vertical Stack View on the view of your view controller and set the constraints so it spans the whole screen.
Select the stack view we just placed and set the distribution to Fill Equally.
Drag and drop a Horizontal Stack View onto the vertical one.
Select the horizontal one and set the distribution to Fill Equally.
Place your buttons in the Horizontal Stack View.
Copy and paste the horizontal stack view multiple times based on number of rows you want.
That's it.
You can control the buttons' background images to make it smaller (65px), or you can place a view as its' parent then align horizontally/vertically to place it to the center, like this:
Orientation
If you'd like to lock the orientation throughout the app, go to the settings of your project.
Sample project
I made a sample project for this question, you can check it out here: https://github.com/cyhsutw/UIStackView-example

Related

Change constrains depending on screen size

I tried to solve this at my own, but I just really can not understand auto layout. I also searched here for a solution, but I could not find anyone with this similar problem (although I see a lot of people struggling with auto-layout). I want to make an app in landscape mode what is supported by every iPhone 5 and higher. I set up some constrains, with this as result:
How it should be
Above is the correct image on how it should be on every device. Can I set it relative to a screen size? I tried changing values with the multiplier, but that did not worked out well.
How it is on bigger screens
Here you can see how it is now. Because the values are absolute and not relative, I think it not changes... By the way, I am using " compact height" for building my landscape apps for iPhone, is that correct? Or is this the cause of this big trouble?
Here's a quick run through that might be more applicable to your needs than the general tutorials...
Create your elements on the storyboard and lay them out in roughly the right place:
Select items 1-4 and hit the stack view button, then select items 5-8 and do the same, Xcode is very good at guessing what you want so you'll get two vertical stack views, like this:
Select them both, hit the stack view button again and you'll get a horizontal stack view that contains your two vertical stack views:
Then select this stack view and the header and press the stack view button one last time to put them in another vertical stack view:
How you just need to adda few constraints to the outer stack view and then tweak the settings of each stack view. In this case, I've pinned the outer stack view 20 from the view edges, set the outer stack view to fill proportionally and everything else to fill equally, plus I've set the vertical stack views to centre alignment. You can play with all of these settings to get a result that you find pleasing:
This will now scale perfectly for any size screen:
I've just used labels for speed, but the same rules apply for images or whatever.
Hope that helps, stick with the tutorials and keep practicing until you figure it out, it will save you lots of time in the long run.

How do I get a button to position on the bottom of a view controller in Xcode 7.2?

I used to be able to do this:
UIButton *bigBottomBtn=[[UIButton alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, self.view.frame.size.height-60, self.view.frame.size.width, 60)];
I also used to be able to just drag a button onto a storyboard and add a constraint that would hold it to the bottom of the parent.
What is going on with Xcode, Autolayout and Apple for that matter....is my Xcode not working properly? Have I missed a major memo? is Apple just going downhill fast?
Your button-creating code used to work (and still does) if self.view's frame was correct at the time you created the button. Note that the view doesn't necessarily come out of the xib or storyboard with the correct frame; the xib/storyboard contains the view at some design size which might not match the current device. This wasn't as much of a problem when all iPhones had 3.5 inch screens, but became a pretty common problem with the advent of the iPhone 5's 4 inch screen.
The view isn't guaranteed to have its correct frame until its superview's layoutSubviews returns, so if for example you're creating bigBottomBtn in viewDidLoad, that's too early. Many questions on stackoverflow cover this problem. You either need to set the autoresizingMask of the button, or implement layoutSubviews or viewDidLayoutSubviews to update the button's frame, or turn off translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints and install constraints. Note too that your view can change size if you support rotation, slide over or split view multitasking, or if your view can be the detail view of a UISplitViewController, so it's a bad idea to try to guess the correct frame of the button based on the device's screen size at the moment the button is created.
Note that storyboards now by default use a design size of 600x600, which isn't the size of any device. This is probably because if Apple chose some device's size (say, the iPhone 5's 320x568) as the default, and you happened to use a device of that size as your primary (or only) test device, you could easily forget to think about what your app will look like at other sizes. However, you can explicitly set the design size to some device's size if you want:
I usually use “iPhone 3.5-inch” if I don't specifically need something bigger, because it lets me get the most scenes on the screen simultaneously (and produces the smallest screen shots for stackoverflow).
As for “I also used to be able to just drag a button onto a storyboard and add a constraint that would hold it to the bottom of the parent”, I have good news: you still can. Example:
However, you do need to be careful if you have filled your root view with a table view as appears to be the case in your screen shots. You need to drag the button to the document outline in that case, because if you drop it on the table view, Xcode will assume you want it to be the table view header:
Trying to pin a table view header to the bottom of the screen would be folly.
As for the Editor > Align menu, I have found that the items can be mysteriously inactive, which is frustrating.
Note, though, that only the “Horizontally in Container” and “Vertically in Container” will work (when they work at all) with a single view selected. To use the other items in the menu, you need to have at least two views selected, because the other items align the selected views with each other by setting their frames:
If you only have one view selected, Xcode doesn't know what other view you might want to align it to.
Those menu items are perhaps useful in the springs'n'struts model, but they don't add constraints, and under autolayout you probably want constraints to enforce the alignment at run time.
As far as I know, those menu items have never added constraints, but I'm not going to reinstall Xcode 6 to verify that, because there's a convenient popover that will add constraints corresponding to all of those menu items:
In xcode you always need to add buttons according to its visibility. As you said you need to show button on top of tableView and it should be aligned to bottom. For that You just need to arrange the order of items. as shown in the image below.Provide the layout for the button.

Different iOS devices size programming approach

I am starting a new project which should be working on every iOS device size possible.
The project is rather simple. The main view will be a scroll view and it will hold a '+' button (where it says 'button' in the image) in the top right corner. (It does not really matter, I'm just trying to give the general idea of what I'm trying to understand and implement.)
A small example:
What is the right approach for this kind of problem?
Should I create a different storyboard for each device?
Should I start creating an adjustable scroll view that will hold the needed buttons with some constraints (if at all possible)?
I have read this tutorial:
auto layout
which explains the auto layout nicely, but does not mention the issue I'm trying to figure out.
Any thoughts?
Use AutoLayout and position your views relative to one another (so no x pixels spacing between views). Make only one storyboard for all devices, when a different view should be loaded on another device (like a completely different layout), select the appropriate size class and adapt the views and constraints.
Then it will be recalculated on every device.
The storyboard has a preview section where you can choose a device to simulate the view on.

Change view sizes inside UIScrollView using Autolayout

I'm trying to create a 3x3 menu, based on a grid of buttons, and I'm facing a lot of problems trying to adapt it to different screen sizes.
Since I want my menu to be equally spaced on the screen (using autolayout tricks on the Storyboard), I have created a custom class with this menu that i'm adding to the center part of the main controller view. The problem is that the menu doesn't fit in small screen (3,5" screens).
Trying to solve this problem, I have created a scrollView in the main screen to add the menu and be able to scroll in small screens.
The problem is that since the view I'm loading in the scrollview, automatically fits to the size of the container (in this case the UIScrollView), only a small part of the menu is appearing in the 3,5" screen, without the option of scrolling (In bigger views it appears equally spaced and everything appears correctly).
How can I solve this UIScrollView problem? Or there is a better solution for this problem?
p.s: I'm sorry, but I don't have enough reputation to add images :(
Uiscrollview with autolayout has some pain into it.
You need to place you're inner views so the scrollview Will be able to understand the contentsize it should use.
You can find more detailed info here
http://infinite-edward.tumblr.com/post/66865604683/uiscrollview-contentsize-and-autolayout-gotcha

interface builder : make the view the same size as the iphone, to know exactly what constraints to add?

is there a way to have the view from interface builder in Xcode, be the same size as the iphone we use to test the app? The size of the viewcontroller seems to be 600*600. So when I move a UILabel somewhere to the left for example, it will be placed as if it was on the right on my iphone. Which is not easy to set the right constraints.
Do you have some tips to manipulate the items and place them easily? For now, I just align the item with the center point, and move it little by little.
The reason this happens is because of Apple's emphasis of size classes. It looks like a rectangle because whenever you are adding constraints and views, they'll be applied to every size class (i.e. horizontal/compact, vertical/compact, etc).
In english, it means it's applying those changes to run as such on any device.
To create constraints and views for just one size, you'll want to edit the size class you are working with. At the bottom of Xcode where it says "wAny hAny", click that and you can set what device you want to work with:
The whole idea of this is adaptive design, and I've got a post explaining it in more detail here.
The thing is that there is no one correct size for the iphone screen because there are so many different screen sizes. You can set the view size to anything you want in interface builder by clicking on the view and going to simulated metrics -> size but what you really want is autolayout so that your views fit properly on every device.

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