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

Improving Auto Layout structures with UIStackView


Along with iOS 9, comes a long list of new features. The UIStackView class is one of the most interesting for sure.

Getting used to Auto Layout requires a bit of perseverance, but even when you already feel comfortable with the tool, you need to deal with the maintenance of your constraints. Depending on the complexity of the user interfaces, you might find yourself surrounded by constraints! Even if you try to keep the structure well organized, a day will come when you really need to add "those new buttons", and your well-organized structure eventually needs to be reorganized by deleting, moving, and creating new "stuff".

Thanks to UIStackView, we can dramatically simplify this structure by leveraging a system built on Auto Layout that hides most of the UI complexity by handling constraints for us automatically.

A stack view is essentially an element that's capable of displacing its subviews autonomously along a predefined axis: vertical or...