Anchorman

Do you think autolayout has to be hard?

Nah. NSLayoutAnchor is pretty neat! But it's still a bit tedious of an API. Try writing .translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false and .isActive = true 10 times over. But we can make it a bit easier with a very thin layer of abstraction.

Let's start off with a vocabulary lesson.

UIView and UILayoutGuide are Anchorable. You can pin one to the other, in any combination you like, as long as it generates valid NSLayoutConstraints.

How's it work?

I am a cool developer, making a cool app. It has so many views. I want to pin my view to it's superview.

self.backgroundView.pinToSuperview()

That was easy, but I don't want to pin to a superview anymore, I want to pin to another view.

self.messageLabel.pin(to: self.backgroundView)

Ah, ok. Easy enough… How about pinning my label to the left and right side of it's superview… and with insets… and center it in my view.

self.titleLabel.pinToSuperview([ .leading(10.0), .trailing(10.0), .centerY ])

Whoa, that was neat! You can specify a group of edges you want to pin to, and their offsets. Swift enums are the best!

And of course, you can pick one edge to pin to another edge.

self.footerLabel.pin(edge: .bottom, toEdge: .bottom, of: self.view.safeAreaLayoutGuide, constant: 10.0)

Last but not least, set constant values for your constraints. For width, height, or both.

self.footerLabel.set(size: .width(44.0) ])
self.titleLabel.set(size: [ .width(44.0), .height(44.0) ])

I lied, there's a bit more. Anchorman includes a couple of goodies to make your life easier between iOS 10 and iOS 11.

var backwardsCompatibleSafeAreaLayoutGuide: UILayoutGuide 
var backwardsCompatibleSafeAreaInsets: UIEdgeInsets 

These will use safeAreaLayoutGuide and safeAreaInsets on iOS 11, and layoutMarginsGuide and layoutMargins on iOS 10, so you can avoid a whole bunch of if #available conditions.

Installation

Anchorman supports Swift 4 with the latest versions. If you're looking for Swift 3 support, use version 2.0

You can use CocoaPods to install Anchorman by adding it to your Podfile:

platform :ios, '8.0'
use_frameworks!

pod 'Anchorman'

Or Carthage

github "mergesort/Anchorman"

Or install it the old fashioned way by downloading Anchorman.swift and dropping it in your project.

About me

Hi, I'm Joe! @mergesort everywhere on the web, but especially on Twitter.

License

See the license for more information about how you can use Anchorman. I promise it's not GPL, because I am not "that guy".

Fin

Hopefully Anchorman is your cup of tea, it's the kind of autolayout library I'd want to use. And with that, good night San Diego.