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.
UIView and UILayoutGuide are Anchorable. You can pin one to the other, in any combination you like, as long as it generates valid NSLayoutConstraints.
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.
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.
Hi, I'm Joe! @mergesort everywhere on the web, but especially on Twitter.
See the license for more information about how you can use Anchorman. I promise it's not GPL, because I am not "that guy".
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.
