Altio Designer Features: Snap to Grid and Snap to Controls
When dragging controls around a window in the Altio Designer you may have noticed that their X and Y co-ordinates snap to the nearest pixel value that is a multiple of 5. In other words there is an invisible grid that the controls are fixed to when you drag them around. In Altio versions 5.x that grid is only invisible for performance reasons, you can make it visible if you wish to see it. To do this select File->Preferences from the Altio Designer’s main menu. The properties window should now show all the preferences that control the Designer’s behaviour. If you check the box next to “Draw Guidelines” you should find that now when you drag a control around the window you can see the grid lines the control is snapping to. 
The darker lines on the top and the left indicate the top and the left edge of the control(s) you are dragging to make it easier to line up with other items on the window. If the lines are difficult to see because of the colour scheme of your application you can try changing the “Guide color” and “Guide opacity (%)” properties. Changing the “Snap Granularity” will change the gap between the grid lines. If you don’t want to “snap” at all enter 0 into this field or change “Snap mode” to “NONE” to gain complete per-pixel control over where the dragged control ends up.
Another way of lining up controls on a window is to use a different “Snap mode”. Entering “CONTROLS” for this property will cause guidelines to appear whenever a control that is being resized or dragged has an edge that lines up with the edge of another control on the window and the dragged control will snap to that line. 
You can use these modes to achieve precise and aesthetically pleasing UI Layouts and forms that are well spaced with good flow. Try using the grid mode with a very high granularity to achieve an effective grid based system in your Altio application.
Altio will be releasing a new Grid container control in Altio 5.3 to give even more control over grid based layouts.
