Book Image

Learning iOS UI Development

Book Image

Learning iOS UI Development

Overview of this book

Through this comprehensive one-stop guide, you’ll get to grips with the entire UIKit framework and in a flash, you’ll be creating modern user interfaces for your iOS devices using Swift. Starting with an overview of the iOS drawing system and the available tools, you will then learn how to use these technologies to create adaptable layouts and custom elements for your applications. Next, you’ll be introduced to other topics such as animation and code-drawing with Core Graphics, which will give you all the knowledge you need to create astonishing user interfaces. By the end of this book, you will have a solid foundation in iOS user interface development and will have gained valuable insights on the process of building firm and complex UIs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning iOS UI Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

How Auto Layout works


With Auto Layout, you can arrange your app's UI by defining relations between UI elements. These relations are called constraints. A constraint can be defined between two different elements to set a distance between them, for instance, or it can be associated to a single element and used to define its width/height.

At first, this might sound strange, because in Chapter 1, UI Fundamentals, and Chapter 3, Interface Builder, XIB, and Storyboard, we talked about how to place subviews independently by only taking care of where to draw them and modifying their frame/bounds properties. There's more to it, however.

You can set up Auto Layout in three main ways:

  • You can add all the constraints from Interface Builder directly thanks to a (almost) complete list of instruments

  • You can add constraints using code thanks to Visual Format Language (VFL) if you need more control

  • You can generate constraints automatically starting from the current autoresizing mask and translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints...