I have tried for several hours to design and place the different elements accordingly. But it seems like no matter what I do, the elements get messed up with sizes and location when moving to different device (screen sizes).
How would you place constraints in the screen below to ensure proper scaling and position when moving to a different device?
http://postimg.org/image/hl4incjzh/
I only work in portait mode.
The views at the left is a UIImage view and a UIWebview which is hidden, and will show dynamically based on external content.
Label and the textview below is also dynamically populated on ViewDidLoad.
Any ideas, suggestions?
You can click on a view element and use the add-constraints-menu:
There you can set different size-options like the margin, if the view should resize etc.
Related
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.
I have a container view showing a sidebar which is pinned to the main views leading edge. The sidebar is initial visible which is fine for iPads however I would like it to be hide initially for smaller devices. To do that I need to set the side bars trailing edge constraint to be (0 - its own width)
As far as I can see this is not possible in the interface builder. I have tried to do it in the viewDidLoad, checking if the device is an iPhone before doing self.sidebarX.constant = -self.sidebar.frame.width. This fails because viewDidLoad has not set up the views yet so the width is wrong. I also tried to do it in viewDidLayoutSubviews however the user sees the sidebar disappearing which isn't nice. I am sure there must be a common way of dealing with this?
I finally worked it out. viewDidLayoutSubviews was the correct place to be doing this. At first when I tried it, it was showing the sidebar slide away as the view controller loaded. It turns out this is because I was calling my closeSidebar method which animates the side bar moving off screen. Changing this so it just sets the view off screen and adding a check to ensure this only done once on first load (as viewDidLayoutSubviews is called multiple times) does the job of hiding the the sidebar for certain devices without anyone seeing it happen.
You can set this using xcode adaptative layout:
You can set the different position for all different screen types here, changing the constraints, positions, sizes to each different type you need.
You can install the layout of one object in different screen types using the dialog below:
Have a look in this 2 parts tutorial from raywenderlich part 1 part 2
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
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.
I have a problem adapting my apps to the new iphone5 layout, I've made the following passes:
Added a retina 4" splash image
Modified the interface in my storyboard with "Size inspector" to change the anchoring of the widgets
Tested the app with iOS6 "retina 4" simulator.
The app works as expected except when the user pop up the keyboard to edit a text, I use the "stretching scrollview" method for this particular situation and this seems not compatibile with the "autosizing" properties of my widgets, here is an example, from iOS6 simulator, without and with keyboard:
And here is what happens:
I'm quite sure this is a coherent behaviour since my main view is stretched so the other items inside it are stretched following their anchoring, the fact is that I'd like to have the same behaviour of my previous fixed position (all widgets anchored to the top left corner) with the iphone5 gui expansion, is this possibile?
How do you solve the problem of showing a keyboard and scroll hidden content in an iphone 5 compatible way?
I have been having similar problems. From what I have found thus far, we may need to remove all constraints on the view within the scrollable view, because it appears that it's contents are being resized along with the frame of the scrollView. I know that setting the internal view's frame manually in viewWillAppear will work, but then you are stuck having a view that is the same size for both iPhone4 and iPhone5 (albeit it will scroll). Or you could "pin height and pin width" of the internalView right there in storyboard.
Two potential approaches that may work. Sorry I can't confirm these as I'm giving up and redesigning around this problem.
1. Programmatically add constraints to your internal view's subviews. The programmatic constraints will allow you to "spring" the distance between your elements proportionally. When adding constraints programmatically, you are given access to a factor called "multiplier" (not to be confused with priority), which I saw someone else on stackoverflow posting about.
2. You can design the internalView in Interface Builder as a separate viewController with it's .xib file, and then use storyboard to load it as an embedded viewController to a "containerView" object, which you would put in place as the new "internal view" of the scrollView. Perhaps then the .xib would first resize to the correct iOS device, and then you could use its frame to resize the containerView.
My advice is create a small test-case of these before implementing, else you end up like me, having spent hours down the wrong path and facing a dead-end.
UPDATE 12/4/12
Make your life easier by NOT setting the ScrollView as the main view of the ViewController.
--Instead, make ViewController.view a dummy/blank view, and embed a scrollView inside that view. Then, embed another view (my CustomView) in the ScrollView. CustomView contains all the visible controls and text boxes and buttons. There is NO HEIGHT CONSTRAINT on CustomView.