I struggled with those, but after a few years doing iOS dev, it isn't so bad. It all eventually sticks.
And autolayout is freakin awesome imo, though I hear a lot of people groak about it.
And autolayout is freakin awesome imo, though I hear a lot of people groak about it.
Something else I really dislike when it comes to constraints - they don't play well with animations, at least in my experience. I recently created a view that had a variable number of square buttons in it that were laid out in a grid two rows high. Making a nice animation when you add a new button, fading in the new button, and sliding the others out of the way was nigh on impossible (ie 'not possible without writing more code than if I had just done the layout manually). And yet, this seems to be the perfect use case for auto layouts...
I often wish we had something akin to autolayout for CSS.
But for my big projects I do 100% of the UI in the code, if the UI use a lot of custom control, it just not worth it to use IB, the end result is that what you see is not at all what you get. BUT it improved a lot with Xcode 6, because now it can render custom views live in Interface Builder.
Auto layout on the other side.... it's just broken.... Every time I try to use it I got what you mentioned in your first paragraph. And I do a lot of animations in my apps, and playing with 10 constrains instead of a simple frame is just .... too much of a burden.
Again, for big custom apps I don't use it, but I love those functionalities for small & simple apps.