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

How about I show you?

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

myView.pinToSuperview()

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

myView.pin(toView: someCoolerButton)

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.

MYCAPITALIZEDLABEL.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.

myImportantLabel.pin(edge: .top, toEdge: .bottom, ofView: myGreatSearchBar, constant: 10.0)

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

myView.set(size: [ .width(44.0), .height(44.0) ])

Installation

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

platform :ios, '8.0'
pod 'Anchorman'

Or install it manually 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.