Hi everyone, and welcome to this week’s roundup. I just got back in on Saturday from a long overdue vacation, so you can expect things will be getting back to normal around here over the next couple days, and the new feature work I’ve been mentioning will be getting wrapped up soon.
Submitting Controls
originally posted at http://cocoacontrols.com/posts/submitting-controls
I want to mention that we greatly appreciate your control submissions. I am continually impressed by the resourcefulness, dedication to quality, and willingness to share demonstrated by our community. To that end, I wanted to mention a few things about the process behind the scenes, both so you can better understand how and when content is published to the site, and also to help us streamline the process.
The queue
Controls are published on what is typically a first-in first-out basis. Right now, there are seven controls in the queue. When we have a big backlog (>15), we’ll publish two controls a day. Otherwise, when the queue is getting smaller, we’ll publish one per day.
When a control’s turn for publishing comes up, I’ll take a look at the control and ensure that it meets our quality bar, add a screenshot if necessary, edit the control’s description for language and clarity, and then publish it. Sometimes, if I am pressed for time, I’ll skip over a control that lacks a screenshot, or has an ‘incorrect’ screenshot (‘incorrectness’ is described in more detail below).
If a control fails to meet a certain threshold for utility, novelty, or code quality, I’ll decline to publish it, and instead delete it from the system. I don’t do this very often, but I do try to ensure that the content we publish remains useful and/or highly novel for you.
Speeding your submission through the queue
The best way to ensure your control speedily makes its way through our queue is by following these guidelines:
- Make sure your control has an example project that demonstrates how to use it. I see quite a few controls come through that point to a GitHub repo that consists of nothing more than a .h/.m file pair and a README. Unless I am really intrigued by the control’s description, I’ll usually decline to publish these, since the alternative is for me to fork your repo, write an example project, and submit a pull request.
- Include a good-looking screenshot. A few months back, Apple added the ability to capture a properly-sized screenshot of your iOS app from the Simulator, simply by pressing ⌘S. Sometimes, submitted screenshots include the Simulator chrome, or errant black lines at the top or bottom.
- Include a good description. A simple two-to-three sentence description of your control is ideal. If you have a blog post that goes into more detail about the control, please include that in the ‘Found At’ field on the control submission page.
- Include a license. Technically, any control marked as having an unspecified license can’t safely be used in other people’s projects. A license should be included in your source repository, and selected on the control submission page. Additionally, it’s ideal if your repository’s README clearly spells out which license you’re using. In other words, the README should explicitly say ‘MIT License’, followed by the license text, instead of just including the license text. Otherwise, you’ll find that people actually have to copy and paste a snippet of the license into Google to ensure they know which one they’re looking at.
- Email us! If you have any questions that aren’t addressed here, let us know at [email protected]. We’ll be happy to help you out.
Cheers,
Aaron
AutocompletionTableView
Our control of the week, AutocompletionTableView offers you an autocompletion experience reminiscent of what you get with a UISearchDisplayController, but with a far more lightweight feel. Simplified BSD license.
Grab the source, or check it out on YouTube
ADVProgressBar
A custom progress bar that comes in multiple colours. It shows a display above the bar that depicts the amount of time left in percentages. Submitted to us by Tope, the overseer at App Design Vault. MIT license.
VSSilentSwitch
Need to work out the state of the iPhone’s silent switch in iOS 5? This simple static library lets you do just that with a single call. Licensed commercially on a per bundle ID basis for $20.
EMHint
EMHint is an iOS class group that easily adds a spotlight-like effect to a view highlighting or hinting at something that may be important on the screen. Great for quick “how to” or tutorials in your app. License is unspecified.
OCPDFGen
This library allows you to generate PDF files from HTML, Markdown, NSAttributedStrings, and NSStrings. It saves the resulting file in the Documents folder on the device, and hands back the URL. BSD license.
CountryPicker
CountryPicker is a custom UIPickerView subclass that allows the user to select a country from a list. It can optionally display a flag next to each country name, and the library includes a set of 249 high-quality, public domain flag images from FAMFAMFAM. zlib license.
CPPickerView
A custom, configurable, horizontal version of UIPickerView (based on the spinning-wheel or slot-machine metaphor), with an included table cell implementation. Originally intended for condensing the space/rows needed for a multi-option setting. MIT license.
