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Anchorman

BuddyBuild Pod Version Swift Version License MIT Plaform

Do you think autolayout has to be hard?

That doesn't make any sense

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.

I don't know what we're yelling about!

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!

That escalated quickly

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

I'm Ron Burgundy

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.

Stay Classy San Diego