I went to see the latest post about iOS that Geoff made on the blog.
It is quite encouraging : the IDE is there, and the auto-layout feature is intriguing. Less worry about supporting the various screens.
iOS7 support as well seems like a must.
Altogether, it feels like it’s finally coming 
As with everything new, only time will tell on if it will be usable in the first release. There will be rough edges and some things that we want but haven’t been fully developed yet. But yeah, I’m looking forward to using it.
I don’t know where you got that, Bob. The rest of us know from experience that everything works perfectly the first time and always exceeds expectations…
The blog post triggers some other concerns for me:
Well, I hope that the enthusiasm about this new feature will not lead to a situation where we no longer can control exact positioning of controls in the ‘old’ way. I’m worrying a bit, because in the past there once was an attempt to drop manual Tab Order setting with an ‘automatic’ one only … Such thing would kill my main product.
But we will see.
[quote=58905:@Oliver Osswald]The blog post triggers some other concerns for me:
Well, I hope that the enthusiasm about this new feature will not lead to a situation where we no longer can control exact positioning of controls in the ‘old’ way. I’m worrying a bit, because in the past there once was an attempt to drop manual Tab Order setting with an ‘automatic’ one only … Such thing would kill my main product.
But we will see.[/quote]
You can always set a constraint that is the equivalent of what you’d get today with locking
But there are things, like in the video. that can’t be down with locking today (setting the control to stay positioned a “standard gap” from the left & right of the other controls).
Yes that concerned me a bit.
These things can be done with a call to a resizing function in the resizing/resized window events. A couple of our apps have some pretty complex manual positioning going on behind the scenes and hopefully this won’t all be broken with the auto layout.
As with anything like this, the best way to introduce it is to have the new default not change anything in existing controls. Hopefully that will be possible when Xojo implements it (auto-layout turned off by default for existing controls?).
I was wondering… will developers be able to build iOS packages for the App Store on their Windows and/or Linux machines, or will the packaging of the app require a Mac machine with XCode installed on it?
I was actually wondering about the Xojo iOS builds… and whether or not XCode would be required in conjunction with Xojo to package the Xojo built apps.
I stand to be corrected but I think I recall that Xojo iOS development will require a Mac
I have a couple of apps in the App store, made with Corona.
(On which I have given up, btw)
But to upload the apps to the app store you need (obviously) a developer account and the uploading to the app store is done via an App Uploader utility which only runs on a Mac.
I can’t help feeling that this auto layout is a ‘nice to have’ but not massively essential at this stage.
(I’d probably have taken something that builds , even if I had to place the controls myself.)
Still, its encouraging to know that work continues. Looking forward to the end result.
I too am concerned with autolayout on teh desktop… Sometimes it would be useful but sometimes I need to have exact control of position i layout and when resizing…
I don’t want to have positioning too smart for it’s own good so that have to work to find ways to “fool” it to have the control I have today… In other words perhaps it should be an optional setting per containing control.
From what I understand of the autolayout, it takes place when a change in screen size occurs. Traduced in Desktop terms, it would occur when a window is resized. In general, very precise controls placement is necessary with fixed size windows, right ?
I tend to use only no resizable windows, so autolayout should not be too much of a desktop hassle
It’s a little early to worry about the desktop version of autolayout, but we are aware that people still need precise positioning.
Stuff for the App Store has to be code signed and submitted using Apple’s tools.
If I recall correctly, the auto-layout feature should also help on resizing labels when the text changes (see localization).
I believe that even iOS Ad-Hoc applications (not for the App Store) need to be code-signed.
Lock left amounts to the auto layout rule - keep this X many pixels from the left
Lock top an lock right are similar
Autolayout should get rid of the need to write ALL that positioning code
Autolayout isn’t a “per control” thing
Design an app - Yes
Debug no - since there is no iOS simulator - which is where debugging happens
Deploy will require whatever deploying and Xcode app will
Basically a Mac will be necessary at some point