Hi everyone, and welcome to this week’s Weekly Roundup! In addition to trolling GitHub for cool, new controls, we also read a ton of blogs, Twitter posts, and Hacker News links, where we run into all sorts interesting content that—traditionally—hasn’t fit in well with the standard Cocoa Controls model. So, we’re mixing it up a bit, and adding a new feature this week: What We’re Reading. It seems like a shame to not share this stuff, and we hope you like it. Let us know what you think!
Thanks,
Aaron
What We’re Reading
- When iPhone Apps Are Reduced In Price, Sales Go Up 22% – Some analysis of application price vs. volume in the App Store.
- Making Rounded Rectangles Look Great – Trickier than you might expect, perfect rounded rectangles appear everywhere in iOS. Mike Rundle shows you how to make them happen.
- How to Submit Your App to Apple: From No Account to App Store, Part 1 – Gustavo Ambrozio walks you through the process of getting your iOS apps into the App Store.
- High-res iBooks 2 Graphics Are No Accident, iPad 3 Retina Coming – TNW reports that the just-launched iBooks 2 has retina-sized graphics for iPads included with it.
- iBooks Author – New from Apple: “iBooks Author is an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad.”
FlipTransform
FlipTransform is an animation component for iOS that gives you a ‘flip’ effect, like in a news or clock ticker, or a page turn. MIT licensed.
F3Swirly
F3Swirly, from Brad Benson of Maplewood, MN (go Gophers!), is a component that offers visual aspects of both an activity indicator and an annunciator. The control uses Quartz 2D and Core Animation to provide a reasonable level of performance with virtually no CPU overhead required for the animation. The number of segments, segment color, segment thickness, rotation rate, and text can all be customized. BSD licensed.
JWFolders
JWFolders, from Jonathan Willing, is a set of classes that mimics the folder animation present on the iOS SpringBoard. BSD licensed.
TSMiniWebBrowser
TSMiniWebBrowser, from Toni Sala, is a customizable web browser component that also fixes a UIWebView bug that causes erratic behavior when combining “zooming operations” and landscape orientation. MIT licensed.
YmsGradientButton
YmsGradientButton, from Charles Choi, is an iOS UIButton subclass featuring plist-configured bitmap-free gradients. It is written with ARC. Apache 2.0 licensed.
BSKeyboardControls
BSKeyboardControls, from Simon Støvring, makes it easy to put previous, next and done buttons above the keyboard in your iPhone or iPad app. BSKeyboardControls is optimized for both iPhone and iPad. MIT licensed.
QuickDialog
We’ve all dealt with the hassle of constructing UITableViewController subclasses specifically to capture a couple pieces of data. Maybe you’ve even created a half-baked generic frameworky sort of thing to make the process easier. I know I have, at least twice. This isn’t any fun, and yet we keep doing it. I now know that there’s a better way to deal with these sorts of things, with this week’s Control of the Week: QuickDialog.
QuickDialog, from Eduardo Scoz, is a super-easy way to create HIG-compliant iOS forms for your apps without having to directly deal with UITableViews, delegates and data sources.
Check it out on YouTube
… or grab a copy of the source code.
