Hi everybody – Welcome to another weekly Cocoa Controls roundup.
All the best,
Aaron
Cocoa Controls Roundup
KnobGarageBandStyle
This is a snazzy-looking GarageBand styled knob. Tragically, it does not go to 11.
iOS-MagnifyingGlass
This control, written by Arnaud Coomans, is a loupe or magnifying glass-type control like the one found by pressing any text editing control on iOS.
LBGIFImage
Laurin Brandner’s LBGIFImage lets you create animated UIImages from animated GIF files. I haven’t touched GIFs in years, but given the poor support for the APNG format, I can imagine that this could be quite useful at times. MIT licensed.
MWFeedParser
MWFeedParser is one of two projects we are featuring this week from Michael Waterfall. This handy project is a general purpose RSS and Atom feed parser. If you’ve ever had a need to parse news feeds in your iOS app, you’re going to want to check this out. Available under a custom version of the MIT license.
MWPhotoBrowser
MWPhotoBrowser is this week’s Control of the Week! Here’s what I had to say about it.
Our latest Control of the Week is MWPhotoBrowser from Michael Waterfall. If you’ve ever tried parsing an RSS or Atom feed on iOS, you’ve probably seen his MWFeedParser project. I didn’t know until recently, though, that he’d also created the easiest-to-use drop-in photo browser for iOS that I’d ever seen.
MWPhotoBrowser is an incredibly easy tool for embedding a full screen-capable photo browser into your iOS apps. I tried it out recently with a personal project, and was able to get it up and running in about three minutes flat, no joke! If your apps work with pictures in any capacity, you owe it to yourself to try this out. MWPhotoBrowser is available under the MIT license.
Try it out now, or watch the video on YouTube:
UIViewDrawRectBlock
This unassuming little project, written by Hans Sjunnesson, resolves a regular frustration of mine with iOS development. On a surprisingly regular basis, I find myself wanting to do a little custom drawing with CoreGraphics, but I don’t want to have to go to the trouble of creating a new subclass of UIView, instantiating it, embedding it in a superview, and all the rest of that. I just want some -drawRect: action! And that’s where UIViewDrawRectBlock comes in:
- (void)viewDidLoad {
[self.view addSubview:[UIView viewWithFrame:CGRectMake(20, 40, 60, 60)
drawRectBlock:^(CGRect rect) {
CGContextRef c = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
CGContextSetFillColorWithColor(c, self.fillColor.CGColor);
CGContextFillRect(c, rect);
}]];
}
See what I did there? This thing is awesome! MIT licensed.
RSMaskedLabel
This neat control, from Robin Senior, renders an inverted mask of a UILabel. In other words, the text gets knocked out and the background shows through. License unspecified.
(also, Robin, I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but I think it would be awesome if, assuming you ever have a son, you name him Robin. There’s something wonderful about the idea of someone named Robin Senior Jr. being out there in the world.)
