Why is there an frame rectangle and an bounds rectangle in an UIView?

Here's the cheatsheet:

• frame is where the view is (with respect to the superview)
• bounds is where the view is allowed to draw (with respect to itself)

Some more clarification:

If you are positioning the view in its superview, you almost always change the frame origin.

If you are clipping where the UIView is drawing, you almost always modify its bounds.

Note that you are allowed to have bounds that is bigger than the frame. That is, you can draw "outside the lines" of where you are.

Frame is in the superview's coordinate system, bounds is in the view's coordinate system. From my perspective, it is a convenience to have both. Frame seems to be the more useful of the two, unless there is some case I am unaware of where a subview can have a completely different coordinate system (e.g. pixels scaled differently) than the superview.

I've been having troubles with bounds lately and have done some experimentation. The bounds property does limit where a UIView can draw, but does not limit its subviews. The other thing bounds controls is touch event dispatching. A view will not, as far a I can tell, receive touch events that are outside its bounds. Furthermore, any subview that outside of the parent view's bounds will also not receive touch events. In these situations, you have to pretty meticulously update the bounds of the container view as the size and position of its subviews change. Everything will always draw fine (because subviews aren't clipped by the bounds of their parent) but touches won't be received.

(This really should be a reply to an earlier post, but since I can't reply yet, it's stuck here...)