Hi everyone, and welcome to another weekly roundup! The big news this week is that the new Bootstrap 2.0 UI just went live in the wee hours of Monday morning. Please let us know if you see anything out of the ordinary, have any comments, want to see less of something, or more of something else.
Here are a couple highlights from the UI refresh:
- The layout of the controls pages has been simplified: we’ve consolidated a bunch of information under different tabs on the left side of the page, reducing visual clutter while still only making these items one click away.
- The Authors page now has real, proper photos. None of this 60×60px stuff for us anymore.
- The ‘Links’ section has finally gone live. Lately, we’ve been including a list of what we’re reading in the roundup, and now you can see new items as soon as they come in. We’re considering adding these items to the main Twitter and RSS feed, and would love to get your feedback on that.
Thanks, and until next time!
Aaron
What We’re Reading
- Deadlocks and Lock Ordering: a Vignette – Enforcing lock order and preventing deadlocks by using MIN and MAX.
- Mobile A/B Testing Made Easy – Socialcam talks about how they perform A/B testing in their iPhone app with Mixpanel.
- iOS Framework – Jeff Verkoeyen, iOS developer and all around really great guy, has published a wonderfully detailed guide on how to create, develop and distribute iOS static frameworks easily and painlessly.
- Writers I Read: Marco Arment – An interview with Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper
- Adding iCade Support to Your Game – A tutorial demonstrating how to make your iOS game compatible with an arcade cabinet for the iPad. Neat!
- The iOS-ification of Apple’s Ecosystem – An article that explores how iOS has changed OS X, and how this trend is likely to continue.
- Circuit Playground – This is a little unusual by our standards, but too neat not to share. Adafruit has released a universal app for all of you iOS users who love to dabble with electronics hacking in your spare time. I received an Arduino over the holidays and this looks like a wonderful complement for it.
MJGLayoutKit
MJGLayoutKit is an Android-inspired layout framework for iOS which helps you automatically lay out views. For example, when the size of an image in the layout changes, all content underneath it is automatically pushed down. MJGLayoutKit is available under the simplified BSD license.
JCMSegmentedPageController
A container view controller for iOS 5 that functions like a UITabBarController, but with the tab switcher moved into a UISegmentedControl on top. Apache 2.0 licensed.
JBDaylightOverlay
Our next control is this week’s control of the week. And this week, we have a flippin’ sweet addition for your MKMapViews: JBDaylightOverlay, a control that shows you a projection of sunlight and darkness across the planet. JBDaylightOverlay was written by John Boiles, a software engineer in the Bay Area. Check out the rest of his projects on his website while you’re at it, he’s both prolific and impressive! This control is GPL licensed.
Find out more, or check it out on YouTube:
DAReloadActivity
DAReloadActivity is a subclass of UIButton that offers a built-in UIActivityIndicatorView-like spinning progress indicator. Quite handy if you’re not using pull to refresh. MIT licensed.
CoolUIViewAnimations
As the name implies, this is a collection of cool effects and animations for UIViews. Unfortunately, there is no license specified on the repository.
TweetBot like UIAlertView and UIActionSheet replacement
Just like the name implies, this is a replacement for UIAlertView and UIActionSheet inspired by TweetBot. They have a rather snazzy look and feel, which can easily be customized to fit your needs, and (thankfully) use blocks instead of delegates for callbacks. Unspecified license, but I have opened a bug on GitHub asking them to add one.
MNMRadioGroup
It seems pretty clear by now that if Apple wanted to give us radio buttons, they would’ve given us radio buttons. That said, sometimes you just need them. Here to solve that problem is MNMRadioGroup, which offers you a drop-in radio control group for all of your mutually exclusive needs. BSD licensed.
