Swipe to delete on CollectionView

So, if you want the swipes gesture recogniser to continue recording movement when they are outside of their collection view, you need to attach it to the parent of the collection view, so it's bounded to the full area where the user can swipe.

That does mean that you will get swipes for things outside the collection view, but you can quite easily ignore those using any number of techniques.

To register delete button taps, you'll need to call addTarget:action:forControlEvents: on the button

I would keep the cell as you have it, with the image and the button together. It will be much easier to manage, and they belong together.

To manage moving the image up and down, I would look at using a transform, or an NSLayoutConstraint. Then you just have to adjust one value to make it move up and down in sync with the user swipes. No messing with frames.

For my own curiosity's sake I tried to make a replicate of what you're trying to do, and got it to work somehow good. It differs from yours in the way I setup the swipe gestures as I didn't use pan, but you said you already had that part, and haven't spend too much time on it. Pan is obviously the more solid solution to make it interactive, but takes a little longer to calculate, but the effect and handling of it, shouldn't differ much from my example.

To resolve the issue not being able to swipe outside the cell I decided to check if the point was in the swiped rect, which is twice the height of the non-swiped rect like this:

            let cellFrame = activeCell.frame
            let rect = CGRectMake(cellFrame.origin.x, cellFrame.origin.y - cellFrame.height, cellFrame.width, cellFrame.height*2)
            if CGRectContainsPoint(rect, point) {
                // If swipe point is in the cell delete it

                let indexPath = myView.indexPathForCell(activeCell)
                cats.removeAtIndex(indexPath!.row)
                myView.deleteItemsAtIndexPaths([indexPath!])

            }

I created a demonstration with comments: https://github.com/imbue11235/swipeToDeleteCell

I hope it helps you in anyway!