Programmatically Centering UIViews

Assuming you are inside of a subclass of UIView, you could do this:

-(void) layoutSubviews {
  self.center = self.superview.center;
}

Or, if as above, you are working inside of a ViewController, you could

- (void)loadView {
//...
    self.view.center = self.view.superview.center;
}

I'd say the simplest way to do this is to set the center of the view to be at the center of it's superview (which you can obtain from the superview's height and width attributes):

// Init as above and then...
// Get superview's CGSize
CGSize size = self.superview.frame.size;
[self.view setCenter:CGPointMake(size.width/2, size.height/2)];

I don't think you can do the simpler:

self.view.center = self.view.superview.center;

As the superview's center is defined in the superview's superview. Thus the superview could be centered about (0,0), but you wouldn't want to center your view at this point.

Quote from Apple docs:

The center is specified within the coordinate system of its superview

Brad Smith beat me to the punch, with a slightly more elegant solution :D

Let me know if this isn't what you're looking for, but have you tried:

// when adding to a subview, try this, where myView is the view you need centered,
// and myMainView is the view you'll be adding it to as a subview
myView.center = myMainView.center;
[myMainView addSubview:myView];

In addition to what @Jasarien and @Brad have said, don't forget that you can force auto-centering using the Autosizing springs and struts. Essentially (in Interface Builder) you click around until there are no Autosizing lines visible, like this:

alt text http://gallery.me.com/davedelong/100084/Screen-20shot-202010-03-26-20at-2010-49-18-20AM/web.jpg?ver=12696222220001

In code, you set the -[UIView autoresizingMask] to:

Objective C :

(UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleLeftMargin   | 
 UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleRightMargin  | 
 UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleTopMargin    | 
 UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleBottomMargin)

Swift 3.x :

[.flexibleLeftMargin, .flexibleRightMargin, .flexibleTopMargin, .flexibleBottomMargin]

If you do these, then the view stays centered automatically.

EDIT #1

Answering your edit, you can't do:

self.view.center = self.view.superview.center;

Unless your view has been added as a subview of another view ([anotherView addSubview:self.view];). My guess is that self.view.superview is returning nil, and so you're (luckily) getting {0,0} as the return value when trying to invoke center on nil.

The proper place to center your view would probably be in the viewWillAppear: method of the view controller. Once the view is about to appear, you know that it must have a superview (otherwise how else would it be about to appear?). You could safely set your view's center there.