Like most people I could get buy blissfully without dealing too much with Auto Layout. But there are layout-heavy scenarios where you start having the feeling that they might be much easier to solve using auto layout than by setting autoresizing masks (aka “struts and springs”).
One such example is the layout of controls in an inspector panel where I laid out the controls distanced from each other with layout constraints in Interface Builder. Architecture-wise I am using such an “inspector palette” in a DMInspectorPalette which gives me several collapsible sections. These are contained in a NSTabView (using DMTabBar as header) to get multiple inspectors laid out like in Xcode. And these are the right-most view in an NSSplitView to allow resizing of the inspector panel.
I was having some issues with that beginning with 10.9 which I’d like to document here.