Intrinsic Content Size: Swift’s Sizing Mystery

What is it?

Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash

You may have come across intrinsicContentSize, perhaps through work with UICollectionView or similar.

But what is it, and what can you do to improve you understanding of this for your journey in Swift?

Terminology

frame: A rectangle which describes a view’s location and size in it’s superview’s coordinate system

intrinsicContentSize: The natural size for the receiving view, considering only properties of the view itself

The Basics

I’ve already created a tips article on intrinsic content size which covers something about intrinsicContentSize. I’ve never been happy with that article as it’s just too abstract.

I just want to see what intrinsicContentSize and frame mean for views in UIKit. This is that article.

The Example

In the attached repo is a simple view controller (placed in a UINavigationController) that gives us the opportunity to…