A Swift framework for building dynamic and beautiful user interfaces with intuitive, programmatic layout.
Neon is a Swift framework for programmatically laying out user interfaces in iOS apps. It provides an intuitive, human-centric alternative to Auto Layout, allowing developers to create dynamic and responsive UIs with minimal, readable code. The framework simplifies complex layouts by offering straightforward methods for anchoring, aligning, and grouping views.
iOS developers building custom, dynamic user interfaces who prefer programmatic layout over Interface Builder or Auto Layout constraints.
Developers choose Neon for its simplicity and expressiveness—it eliminates the verbose and often confusing nature of Auto Layout constraints, enabling rapid UI development with clean, maintainable code that closely mirrors natural design thinking.
A powerful Swift programmatic UI layout framework.
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Provides simple functions like anchorInCorner() and anchorToEdge() that mirror natural design thinking, as shown in the README for easy view placement without complex constraints.
Enables complex, responsive interfaces with few lines of code; the Facebook profile demo uses only 10 lines to handle rotation and multiple device sizes, reducing boilerplate.
Supports automatic sizing of UILabels with the AutoHeight constant, which calls sizeToFit() based on content, simplifying dynamic text layouts as demonstrated in the examples.
Allows easy horizontal or vertical grouping of views with methods like groupAndFill(), making it efficient to arrange multiple sibling views, as detailed in the grouping section.
The README admits Neon is in beta for Swift 3.0, which is outdated; this suggests potential instability, lack of updates for newer Swift versions, and limited long-term support.
Limited to UIKit, so it cannot be used with Apple's modern SwiftUI framework, making it less future-proof for iOS development as the industry shifts towards declarative UIs.
Compared to Auto Layout, Neon lacks advanced features like intrinsic content size handling for all view types and has a smaller community, which can hinder troubleshooting and extensibility.