On Jul 4, 2017, at 4:05 PM, David Young <dyoung+cocoa@...> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 04, 2017 at 01:04:04PM -0700, Jens Alfke wrote:

On Jul 4, 2017, at 4:36 AM, Dave <dave@...> wrote:

Does anyone know of an alternative for Auto Layout.
I find myself wasting so much time with it as to be ridiculous, so I’d like to get away from it if possible.

That’s been my opinion of auto-layout too … in theory it should be awesome, but configuring it is ridiculously complex. Every iteration of IB seems to make some of the process easier, but adds more bells and whistles, keeping the workload the same.

Jens, Dave,

I agree that auto-layout is a bit touchy. If it's any help, I think
that under the hood it is solving a problem in "linear programming,"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_programming . I have had some
modest success by writing out my inequalities explicitly, and then
fiddling with the auto-layout API and/or IB until I achieved the
layout I wanted. It's been a while, but ISTR that IB would reset my
constraints for reasons that I did not understand or appreciate.

The polygon in the "pictorial representation" of a linear program hints
at the potential power of auto-layout. You can write inequalities that
approximate a circle or other shape, and then use them to constrain an
NSView's x,y-position or height & width. That comes in handy.

Dave

--
David Young
dyoung@... Urbana, IL (217) 721-9981