I am trying to place 2 WKInterfaceButton items side by side on an Apple watch app.
I have a WKInterfaceGroup which I set its layout to horizontal. This allows me to position the buttons next to each other. The issue is having them both fit exactly side by side and fill the screens width and auto adjusting regardless of watch size (38 or 42mm) . Currently I align one left the other right. Then to adjust the widths i have to manually adjust the widths until it looks correct. This seems a bit too hard coded as it doesn't allow for any future watch screen size changes.
What I need is a way to set a WKInterface element (in this case a button) to be half the available size of the watch. In a normal app you can use
uiElementWidth = [UIScreen mainScreen].bounds.size.width/2
Is there an equivalent in WatchKit?
You can rely on the storyboard to do this. Select the button and make its width to be relative to the container like the following:
use Group as container and inside it align your buttons as left, center, right and Yah! use relative to container as told by Ashraf Tawfeeq
Related
I am testing a godot app, where there is a text heading along the top, and there are buttons along the bottom. For now I have a spacer in the middle to keep the heading at the top and the buttons at the bottom.
If I set Project Settings -> Display -> Stretch to disabled, then I can set a font and button size that looks reasonable for my laptop, and the font size for the heading and button doesnt shrink smaller and larger when the window is adjusted.
How do I guarantee and/or test that the size will be appropriate when the application is exported to iOS and Android? Is there some kind of guide that will help choose appropriate (non scaleable) button sizes for all devices?
How Controls are positioned
There are three intended ways to position a Control in Godot:
Placed in a Container. In this case the Container will control position and sizing of the child Control, taking into account "Size Flags".
See also Using Containers, and Containers.
By anchors (anchor_*) and margins (margin_*). They determine the position of the edges of the Control. The anchors are factors, and the margins are offsets.
For example, the leftmost part of the Control will be positioned at anchor_left * parent_width + margin_left, relative to the parent Control.
You will find presets in the "Layout" menu that appears in the tool bar when you have a Control selected.
See also Size and anchors.
By rect_position and rect_size. These are relative to the top left corner of the parent Control.
Ultimately the other ways to position the Control are changing these. And you can also change these even if you positioned the Control by other means… Which is not intended, but supported (because it is useful to add animations to the UI among other things).
Regardless of which one you use, Godot will respect rect_min_size. And yes, there is also rect_rotation and rect_scale which throw a wrench on the above explanation, but they works as you would expect.
And yes, it is not the easier to use system. Because of that, the designer is being improved for Godot 4 (currently on Alpha 3 at the time of writing).
To answer the question the title: If your stretch mode is set to disabled, and your UI is anchored to the top left (which is the default), you would resize the window and the UI would not scale or adapt to that change. I don't think you don't want the UI to adapt.
Making a top and bottom bars with containers
You can use a VBoxContainer, since we will have three bars stacked one on top of the other, vertically. And yes, the second one is a spacer.
First of all, you want the VBoxContainer to take the whole screen. So set it to the Layout preset "Full Rect". So, yes, we are placing the Container by anchors and margins.
And second, we want the spacer to take as much space as possible. To archive this we set "Expand" flag on size_flags_vertical of the spacer. This is what Size Flags are for.
And, of course, what you place inside the Container might or might not be more Containers.
Making a top and bottom bars with anchors and margins
Give the top bar the "Top Wide" preset. It will set the margins and anchors to have it stay at the top, take the full width, and take its minimum height.
And give the bottom bar the "Bottom Wide" preset. It will set the margins and anchors to have it stay at the bottom, take the full width, and take its minimum height.
You would need no spacer.
And, by the way, I remind you that anchors are margins are relative to the parent. So you can nest this approach. And yes, Controls that are not containers can also have children Controls
About stretch modes
As you know you have a choice between:
viewport: All the sizes will be computed with the original resolution, and then the resulting sizes are scaled to the resolution of the device.
2D: will also compute all the sizes with the original resolution, but instead of scaling the resulting sizes, it renders at that size and scales the image.
disabled: It will compute all the sizes with the actual resolution of the device. No scaling will happen.
Since both viewport and 2D, the size of the UI will not be computed with the actual resolution of the device. This makes the approaches I described to have the UI adapt less effective (less useful or less necessary, depending how you look at it). And thus, if we want to use those approaches effectively we will want the stretch mode set to disabled.
And, of course, there is also the aspect setting.
See also Multiple resolutions and Support multiple form factors and screen sizes.
Designing for small resolution
You can test on the editor how the UI adapts to the resolution, either by resizing the window, or by setting the Test Width and Test Height in Project Settings. You can, of course, also test on an actual smartphone. For instance, I often launch the game in my Android from the Godot editor when developing mobile games.
Circling back to the stretch modes, this is what happens with the text:
disabled: The text stays the same size. This means that the UI can become too small for the text.
viewport: the text scales. This means that the text can become too small to be legible.
2d: the text scales too… except since it is a image scaling it can become blurry, even harder to read.
If we only consider the text, there is no good option. Now, either design the UI for the specific target resolution… Or make one that can adapt. And for one that can adapt, I believe disabled is the best stretch mode as I was arguing above.
And of course you can script it
If you need to run some code when the resolution changes, you can connect to the "size_changed" signal of the root Viewport. And if you need to figure out if the device is in landscape or portrait mode you OS.screen_orientation, and if you really have to, you can create a custom Container.
When I maximize my window, I want to restrict a vertical layout (and the entire row below it also) so that it has a specific size (lets say a width of 200). How can I achieve this? Below is what I get now. The buttons are stretched too far. I want them to keep a width of 200.
To stop the buttons stretching, use the following steps in Qt Designer:
click on scrollArea in the Object Inspector
click on Break Layout on the toolbar
click on scrollArea in the Object Inspector
click on Lay Out in a Grid on the toolbar
click on scrollAreaWidgetContents in the Object Inspector
scroll down to the bottom of the Property Editor
change layoutColumnStretch to 0,1
These steps should remove an empty column from the scroll-area grid-layout, and make the second column stretch to take up the available space when the window is resized.
You just need to restrict the maximum width of all widgets (in this case the buttons) within the layouts of this grid column to the expected size, else they'll just keep expanding. You may also have to fiddle the horizontal size policy; I seem to remember that buttons were a bit tricky in this regard (or was that the height?), but can't test it right now.
The layout size contraint you tried only applies to the layout's direct parent widget, if it has one, which isn't the case for the vertical layouts here.
I know I can fix this programmatically and I know I could set the text to tighten / scale but I would like to know how to get this text to extend organically to a third line on small screens. How can I accomplish that?
There are a couple of things you need to take care of before your label grows:
Make sure the 'number of lines' field in the attributes inspector is set to zero. Setting it zero allows the label to grow depending upon the content it has.
If the label is in a container view, make sure you haven't specified the height constraint explicitly on the container view. Since the container view should generate its height from its subviews and the subviews will generate their height from the content they have. Its sort of a chain process that goes on if you have a deeper hierarchy.
Make sure there is no sibling view to the container view with an explicit height that might cause your container view to shrink while maintaining its own height. This point may also apply even if your label is not within some container view.
In the image below, the container view(gray one) is bound from three sides allowing it to grow from the bottom.
Below image shows the constraints applied to the content views of the container. The container is driving its height from its content views.
Below I have increased the text of the label from a single line to three lines. At this point the label tries to expand horizontally but since the container view is bind with the super view on both sides the label has only one direction left to increase itself. It increases downwards pushing the textfield and button down and since the button is tied with the bottom of the container view it pulls the container view increasing its height.
I'm having trouble using the layout manager system with Qt. This is going to be a Symbian app, so it should resize to different devices.
This is done by using the Layouts.
On the image below I used the Vertical Layout, but I don't understand how I can decide how much each cell should take in width and height.
I want the blue to be a top label background, but I don't want it to be as high as it is now.
Does anyone know how I can do this? (I'm new to Qt :))
You can set the maximum size for a widget by right clicking it and selecting 'Size Constraints'. Under that menu you can find actions that allow you to set the current displayed size as the maximum / minimum size for vertical / horizontal or both directions.
You can also set the numbers by hand by selecting the widget and by setting the number in the 'Property Editor'. They should be under the QWidget properties.
You cannot set the Height of a vertical layout directly, but you can set the height of the widget in which the vertical layout is.
If you want to split your Widgets so that the top widget takes 33.33% of the space, use the Stretch values. Set the top widget to 1 and the bottom widget to 2.
Ok, here is my problem:
I have a vertical layout which contains a QPlainTextEdit and a horizontal layout (containing 2 QPushButtons) below the text edit.
The vertical layout is just a part of GUI, and gets resized depending on screen resolution. Btw. it is a mobile app, so I don't have a lot of space on screen.
Push buttons have some text which is dynamically set, I don't know it from the beginning to code it manually.
My problem occurs when the text in push buttons is big, and my whole vertical layout is expanded to fit the buttons.
How can I make the vertical layout unexpandable? note, that this is different from "fixed" because of different screen resoulutions.
I'd just like the clip the buttons if they do not fit, but keep the layout width untouched.
Anyway to do this?
You'll need to set the maximum width for the buttons, not the layout, which is only widening to fit the wider buttons. Check out the docs on QPushButton and look for QWidget inherited functions called setMaximumSize or setMaximumWidth.
You can always GetWidth() on the button when it is an appropriate size, then setMaximumWidth using that value since you wouldn't ordinarily know this. Pick an appropriate default text size/val and use that to create your "dynamic" default since this is going on screens of varying size.