Hi All,

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.

I’m writing a Game for iPhone, iPad and Mac. I’ve decided to have 3 separate projects for these rather than lump it all into one giant project. The Game Engine will port with no compile problems onto all 3 platforms so all I need to do is the UI for the 3. I’m concentrating on the iPhone for now.

The game doesn’t really have a massive UI. There is a Game Setup screen (Window) and a Game Play screen. I’m only worrying about the Main Game Play Screen for now, this contains a left “Player” Area and a right Board area. The Player Area is 1/3 of the width of the screen (this App is landscape only) and the board takes up the other 2/3’s. The board was quite easy to get working with a bunch of nested Stack Views, but the rest of Ui is proving to be too hard to do with AU.

When I started this project, I decided to give AU a try (I’d previously tried to get on with it twice before) and had hoped that the tools would have improved enough to make it usable and practical to use, however, sadly this isn’t the case, so its better to back out now rather than further down the line.

So, how to lay this out without AU?

I’ve know how I've done this in the past, and adapting the technique in this case would mean:

1. Picking a Nominal device for the initial design, I’d pick iPhone 5s in this case, take the Size of the Root View 568, 320 which would be a constant in the App.
2. The App would read the size of the Root View and set a scaling factor.
3. The App would create and position the views using this scaling factor when it starts up.

I agree its not as flexible as using AU, but it a whole lot quicker and much more maintainable since you are not at the mercy of XCode/IB.

Any one have any other ideas of how to do this?

All the Best
Dave








which is to have a look at the Root View’s size and