Question

I’d like to know what the best approach is to placing multiple UIViews on screen with random coordinates without them touching each other or touching the parent view’s edges.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Use arc4random() to generate random numbers. You’ll want to constrain these to be between 0 and your parent views frame width for the x-coordinate, and between 0 and your views frame height for the y-coordinate. Subtract your random views frame width/height from the extent assuming you want it fully visible.

NSInteger randomX = arc4random() % ((int)view.frame.size.width - randomView.frame.size.width);
NSInteger randomY = arc4random() % ((int)view.frame.size.height - randomView.frame.size.height);
CGRect frameRandom = CGRectMake (randomX, randomY, randomView.frame.size.width,randomView.frame.size.height);

Then you’ll need to enumerate all your existing random views and ensure that your new random view frame doesn’t intersect with the frame of your existing views.

Use CGRectIntersectsRect to see if two UIView frames intersect:

How to figure out if two CGRect intersect?