I have designed a screen for a portrait only iPhone app. I have applied Autolayout so that the view horizontally fits all the screen sizes. The problem is, for smaller screen sizes, the content is truncated vertically. I tried not to set a fix height of components but it breaks all the alignment of the components.
Please see the image for reference;
Any quick suggestion for what I'm missing...
Thanks
If I were you I would would follow one of two approach -
you can use spacer views for spacing between components so that will adjust spacing on the basis of screen height
2.or if your content is bigger than iphone screen then you can always opt for scroll view.(I prefer pure layout approach)
Set vertical spacing between components. Don't fix width and height of components. set aspect ratio constraint for every component.
Like many of the comments and answers above, there are many ways to solve this problem. The decision for you to take is which is more suitable
Aspect Ratio Scaling : One of the common ways to retain the same UI across all form factors is to use the aspect scaling techniques in which constraints are given to mimic the aspect scaling.
Flexible Spacing and Sizing rules : Another way to design the layout is to design the layout to have different types of spacing based on the form-factor of the device. This way layouts may not to be consistent across.
Using Size classes for iOS8 and Above these can be used maintain various layouts for all the form-factors.
Use of ScrollView scrollView can be used if you want to retain the original layout and have scroll to view the layouts that are out of bounds.
Related
I am trying to create an app with this UI.
I am facing a lot of problems because it's like a rhombus.
I tried to use a vertical stackView and these are my previews and my constrains.
I've tried to use aspect ratio(1:1.13 because they are not squares) to resize on all o the screens but on iPad its a lot bigger.
Is there a way to make it smaller on iPads?
I am new to auto layout so I am sorry if this question is not correct.
You're probably overthinking this. Instead of a stack view, create a "spacer" view and use constraints to center it and give it the correct height and width for all screen sizes. Test it. Now add the four squares, giving them correct height and width and positioning them in relation to the "spacer" view. Test that. Finally, hide the "spacer" view.
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 seen a lot of different topics and suggestions on aligning and inputting buttons/text, but the ways I've seen seem kind of risky.
What is the optimal way, for example, to add two buttons, stack them together, and have them be 10% from the bottom of the screen, and centered horizontally on all devices?
Learn Auto Layout if you haven't yet. Use constraints for achieving the following:
For centrally Horizontal on all devices: Use Center X with SuperView.
For having them 10% from bottom, use multiplier value say 0.10 .
The optimal way would be using storyboard for implementation and use of constraints in a proper way.
For example, as you suggested you want bottom space to be 10% of device height so it can be done with the multiplier in constraints also the horizontal center can be easily done with the same, so you could look for a good tutorial of Auto Layout and constraints for better understanding.
Use your Storyboard and add Auto Layout to your elements. Here is an example:
I have added auto layout
Left
Right
Top
Bottom
If I want to change the distance between the buttons, I just choose the auto layout constraint that I have created between the buttons and changes the constant value to it.
If I say that "Button 4" constant to the top shall be 40, then it´s always 40 no matter what size the phone has. If I change the constant between the buttons to 10 then it´s the same for all sizes.
Your best bet is to use Auto Layout. It takes a bit of learning but once you get used to it you can add constraints pretty quickly and easily in Interface Builder. I can't recommend any particular guide but there are a lot of good ones to be found with a quick Internet search.
Here is an example of constraints that seem to be what you are looking for:
For iOS 9, an even simpler Auto Layout approach would be to use UIStackView.
As you can see, no constraints are needed for the buttons embedded in the stack view, as the stack view lays out the buttons for you. All you have to constrain is the location of the stack view itself.
Here's an example of two vertically stacked buttons, 10% from the bottom of the screen, and centered horizontally for all devices.
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.