I'm working on an app dealing with too many Nib or Xib files. One main xib is calling other xibs as subviews. I want to manipulate called xib height programmatically according to data size. Till now I only know how to handle a generic view.
where you are
after taking a quick look on the xib file you have shared, especially its hierarchy and its settings, I can say surely that xib file is not prepared to support any dynamic sizes at all.
that simple xib file has about 200 other views, and individually all views has the very default autoresize-mask setting; that is the
UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleRightMargin | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleBottomMargin
which means (briefly) all views are glued to the top-left corner of its superview and will not change neither their location nor size if its superview does so; as we know that is your problem exactly.
take a look on this screenshot, it is quite talkative (the purple rectangle shows the common default settings of all views here):
NOTE: it seems no one really cared about building up the view layer properly for supporting the essential different sized screens, which has been crucial part of iOS development since we have got iPhone5; by now it has become much more crucial as we have iPhone6 and 6+ devices as well.
where you should head to
you are encouraged to use either autoresize-mask or auto-layout for setting up your view, but teaching you about these tools and techniques from scratch is far beyond this answer's purpose, but I can recommend you to take a look on the advanced auto-layout (which is supported since iOS6) to support dynamic screen sizes in your view layer. later, if you feel necessary you can also adopt supporting size-classes.
the Auto Layout Guide from Apple can teach you the magic about that, and thousand brilliant tutorials are available on the web from developers.
the Multiple Size Classes documentation is also available on Apple's site, and if you need, the related tutorials are also around everywhere on the web.
NOTE: it is hard to give you direct instructions for how you should change your xib file at this point as the final rules, which will be applied for supporting dynamic sizes, depend on your (client's) policy of how you'd like update an individual view's size, what you'd like to see or show on the screen, etc...; therefore unlimited number of variations of possible settings are available which could satisfy your requirement of supporting dynamic sizes.
Related
I've been struggling with this issue for a while and hours of research and experimentation didn't produce any acceptable results.
I have a login screen that contains a lot of UI elements. The view looks great on iphone 7 and 6 variations but when I test it on SE or 4S the constraints fail to position the elements so they fit nicely on their tiny screen. Simply there is not enough room. I read that I must support all screen sizes but at this point I am not sure how can I get all the ui elements to fit in the smaller screens.
I watched hours of youtube videos and tried all possible ways including a vertical stack view but no matter what I try, it either looks good on 7 and 6 but terrible on SE/4S or vice versa (good on SE/4S but way too much white space on 7/6).
At this point I am not sure what else I can do. I know it is not possible to design a UI just for a specific screen size and vary for traits is not what I need because I only intend to support vertical orientation.
Any help or suggestion will be greatly appreciated.
As you have said in your own comment, you can restrict the device sizes indirectly by restricting the iOS version. However that is not a good solution: If you are creating the app for commercial reasons that will unnecessarily restrict your market (there are a lot of 4S users out there); If you are learning app development, now is a good time to work out how to manage GUI layout problems properly (there will always be a wide range of display sizes to cope with).
There are several tools available to assist:
Auto Layout
As others have said in comments, Auto Layout can help a lot. Don't just use it to position things though, but also to resize them to make best use of the available space.
Understanding Auto Layout (Apple)
Size Classes
Size Classes allow you to use different constraints and turn on or off controls depending on the general size and orientation of your user's device. For example, where space is restricted you could hide individual controls and instead display a single control to take the user to them elsewhere (another view or a popover for example).
Size-Class-Specific Layout (Apple)
Scroll Views
You can make part or all of your GUI a scroll view that on larger devices will show all the controls whilst on smaller devices initially show just the top ones but still give your users access to the others (don't forget to flash the scroll bars when the view first appears to show them that there is more to see though).
Separate Storyboards
Although you have not mentioned iPad support, you can also specify completely separate storyboards to help layout universal apps.
See this SO answer and it's linked reference for details.
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I have been in a struggle for a long time with this one.
Lets say I have a UIViewController and need to place an UIImageView with an UIImage in that controller.
So I have two ways to do it:
1.) Via Storyboard
2.) UIImageView *imageView = [UIImageView new];
imageView.frame = CGRectMake(bla, bla, bla);
[self.view addSubview: imageView];
Also I need to support different screen sizes (from iPhone 4 till iPhone6+), and autolayout with constraints isn't fully clear for me. And I'm sh*tcoding like
int wrapperHeight = (screen.height == 480) ? 100 : 200
I feel that i'm doing something wrong.
When i started to learn objective-c, I have seen some opensource projects, and there was no storyboard at all, so i thought that adding views programmatically is a good practice.
Could you please explain me the "right way" ?
I'd say that most of the times storyboard with autolayout is the best choice. It has a number of advantages:
It separates presentation from the logic. Creating the entire interface in a controller is usually a bad design. And for simple interfaces declaring them in an imperative way brings in to much overhead. Very often you'll end up having hundreds of lines of code for the interface that could be done in a storyboard or xib in a 10 minutes without any effort.
With storyboards you have a great WYSIWYG editor, where you can see how the screen will look like on different devices without having to rebuild the project and run it on dozens of devices or simulators. Well, not dozens but 4 different resolutions for iPhones + 2 resolutions for iPads stills a lot. Also there may be tiny differences in text sizing and rendering between retina and non-retina screens
Autolayout. Of course, you can use it in code as well, but default apple's interfaces for them suck. There are some 3rd party libs which make working with autolayout a bit easier, but anyway with storyboards you're not gonna worry about autolayout in code at all in ~80% of the times. And the rest 20% would be just something like adding constraint outlet to the controller and then changing it's constant or priority with a single line of code
Size classes. Again, you may work with them in code, but with storyboards you'll probably wouldn't have to. Size classes allow you to have one single interface for all possible device form-factors, different device orientations, etc. Before size classes developers had to have 2 different sets of interfaces for iPhones and iPads.
However, there are certain places where storyboards aren't the best way to achieve the goal. For example, if you have some view that is used in different places of the app. With storyboards-only approach you'd have to have copies of this view in many places, so when making changes in one of them - you have to remember to make this changes in other copies as well. In such cases it's better to use a separate xib file with such view and then use it in a storyboard.
Also, autolayout may be quite expensive in terms of performance. So if your app starts lagging and you determined (with profiler) that autolayout routines are the reason of the lags - then it may make sense to handle creation and layout of certain views in code manually. But this could be the case only for a really complicated interfaces. Most of the times performance wouldn't be an issue.
You said that autolayout isn't clear for you. That's not the reason to deny using it. You'll have to do a lot more work to make an app look good on all devices without autolayout than with it. "some opensource projects" that you saw could have been written for the first iPhones (4s and before), which all had the same resolution in points and where all sizes and positions could be just hardcoded. Now, as I said earlier, we've got almost a dozen of different resolutions. And handling that all in code manually is a real struggle. Autolayout would make you life easier :)
Also you may take a look at these debates about when and where to use storyboards, xibs and manual view handling: http://www.raywenderlich.com/51992/storyboards-vs-nibs-vs-code-the-great-debate
And on the same site (http://www.raywenderlich.com) you could also look up for autolayout tutorials to understand it better.
Both ways has its own advantages, as a programmer you should be comfortable with both, and to use which one depends on your situation, sometimes its easy to use storyboard/xib and sometimes its easy to build view programmatically
Some advantages of creating views programmatically -
Better to work with team. It's easier to merge code and resolve conflicts when committing to a repository than it is in case of storyboard.
When debugging it's easier to trace errors and you don't have to look to IB.
Creating views programmatically gives you more control
Some advantages of adding views in storyboard -
It's faster to develop view in storyBoard, it helps you to put everything together, like centering views,aligning them, connecting their actions etc.
Your code is not crowded with UI related stuffs, so you have much cleaner code.
Also for people who just start developing apps, its pretty easier for them to use storyboard, and gives them confidence as they can see things they are building.
Bottom line is it depends on your situation and you should choose wisely, suppose you have static UI that doesn't change much or animate, its always easier and faster to use storyboard, but if you have some dynamic UI like it has lot animations and you need to manipulate your constraints then its easier to build your UI programmatically
Also keep in mind that XIB file loading time is longer than build UI programmatically.
I have a feeling about iOS development on which I would like to get feedback.
Storyboard / Interface Builder are, at first glance, awesome tools. The truth is that aside quick prototypes and really simple user interface I always feel blocked using them. This question offers probably a good example: how can I use one storyboard for 4" and 3.5" iphone screens with autolayout (ios6 + ios7)?
I am considering to code all my views. Mostly because it will let me implement some logic, like equal spacing of elements. Something that is, AFAIK, impossible to do in a cross device fashion through the GUI tools.
My questions are: Does Storyboard / IB support advanced view layout? How do you usually code your view if you do so: extending UIView / tweaking the controller?
EDIT: the accepted answer link is nice. Interested readers could also look at Apple's Auto Layout Guide relevant example: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AutolayoutPG/AutoLayoutbyExample/AutoLayoutbyExample.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010853-CH5-SW7
http://www.raywenderlich.com/83276/beginning-adaptive-layout-tutorial
Ray gives a decent starting guide on how easy it is to create a single adaptive view now, which has caused me to switch from being completely programmatic.
Previous to iOS 8 it was much harder to build complex layouts using Interface Builder. You were essentially limited to stretching or pinning to edges. Now you can build layouts that adapt to size classes and change their layouts or constraints based on the width and height of your device.
That being said, even in really difficult scenarios that IB can't handle, I still end up building chunks of views in XIBs and then laying out those chunks manually.
TLDR; Interface Builder is going to be helpful 99.9% of the time as long as you know how to use all its features.
I've read around that Apple is hinting to developers at a larger-screen iPhone by pushing developers to use Storyboard and auto-layout. I understand why auto-layout would be useful, to organise items according to screen size, but what do Storyboards have to do with anything?
I may be missing an obvious advantage (in relation to larger screens), so any help would be much appreciated. :)
A. You say that there are some notice from Apple about the larger screen of the iPhone6: This is impossible because Apple doesn't release any information until the date of Keynotes and WWDC.
B. You can or not use Storyboard, and you can or not use AutoLayout: the 2 things are separate because you can also use AutoLayout in nib or programmatically.
C. What developers don't know, is that Storyboard are just a market move. I spoken directly with a my friend engineer in Apple about this and the information is real. The reason is also obvious. Is not the topic to speak about this but you can search on google and you will find a lot of information about the advantages to don't use storyboard.
Yes, storyboard are easy, but are not developer friendly if you think to work in a serious project with a big team. In a team you can use GIT, you can use shared repositories, you can export a part of code with the interface...in all this thing, Storyboard are BAD!
So i encourage developers to DON'T USE storyboard and use at max NIB file, or write the UI directly by code.
There currently doesn't appear to be any advantage to using storyboards versus XIBs or programmatic layout as far as multiple screen sizes are concerned. Auto-layout is definitely advantageous as it allows you to define your interface elements in relation to each other (and the screen), as opposed to using fixed numerical values for location and size. This would allow the UI to then easily adapt to varying screen sizes and aspect ratios.
The only potential reason storyboards could become useful for multiple screen sizes in the future is if Apple adds functionality to them to allow you to define entirely separate views based on device/screen size. So for example, they might make it easy to show a view with an extra sidebar on a larger screen, but show a separate view without the sidebar on a smaller screen (they might make it possible to configure this easily in a storyboard, versus writing a bunch of code to detect the screen size and load the appropriate view programmatically). As of now, though, no such functionality exists, but that could be a potential source of the rumors regarding storyboards being useful for multiple screen sizes.
New to iOS, coming from the Java / Swing world, where I'm used to creating UIs programmatically, letting components size themselves and using various clever layout managers to arrange things.
It already seems clear that the iOS way is to make heavy use of Interface Builder, with a lot of fixed sizing and positioning. I'm not sure IB is ever going to come naturally, but I guess fixed layouts make sense given that you're working with limited space and a fixed window size.
It still seems like I'm writing a lot of boilerplate, though, and violating DRY, and so on.
Can somebody point me to a good primer on laying out iOS UIs, particularly programmatic UIs?
You don't really need to use IB to write MonoTouch apps. I almost never do. The CocoaTouch API is fairly simple and straightforward to develop on.
I haven't really found any writeup on UI development other than the apple documentation (which is really good, by the way, worthy reading), so here goes a couple of tips, based on my experience:
Inheritance is key to maintaining the code clean. You can inherit from basically any class in the API, like buttons, controllers, views, etc. Inherit and add your customizations in those classes. Don't shove everything in the AppDelegate like many examples show. You'll thank me later on.
Have I mentioned inheritance already?
The one thing iOS doesn't have is a layout manager, so if you're used to Java like you mentioned, this will sound a little strange. Different from what Java people think, this is not a big deal. UITableViews help tremendously with this (vide next point).
A lot of iphone apps are built on top of the UITableViewController, even apps that don't look like tables. It's a great framework to do anything related to scrolling. Learn to use it well. Almost anything that scrolls vertically is a UITVC. Follow the guidelines that define when you create and when you dispose cells and objects.
Be careful every time you add a Frame location in your control. Instead of setting hardcoded values, try using offsets from other locations (x+40, for example) whenever possible.
Make sure you add your views to the proper container as necessary. For example, if you're adding a global "Loading" view, add it to the Window object, while if you're adding a image on the left side of a table cell, use the ContentView. iOS changes those special views automatically all the time (resizing screen to fit "on call" bar at top, or rotating phone).
Miguel de Icaza has created a great framework for managing forms and tables, called MonoTouch Dialog. Take a look, and enjoy.