During my day job I am a product manager. This job does not encourage or provide time to write code. As I was getting ready to take some time off for the thanksgiving holiday, I worked to clear my calendar, clean my inbox and set a few actions in motion so I could really take some down time. Imagine my surprise when I had a few hours at the end of the day where I could do some coding on a demo we’ve been using for some time. The demo consists of a python application that emulates a car, a set of cloud services which process mqtt enabled devices, and an iOS app that represents a key fob that sends messages to the “car” simulator via the cloud. The initial iOS app was designed for one size screen and one orientation. I’ve always wanted the iOS app to be responsive to the orientation of the phone and to resize based on the various screen sizes, so I took the time late Friday to go back and add auto layout to the app.

I didn’t write the initial app, so completely redoing the interface was not an option. I had to go back and deal with auto layout within interface builder. I personally enjoy doing auto layout completely in code, so this was going to be a new experience for me.

After completing all the fixes, checking it into the repo for others on the team to take advantage of I discovered a new setting in Xcode for iOS8 – Adaptive Layout. I plan on doing some looking at that next!