Hi everyone, welcome to our weekly roundup. I’m sure you’ve heard the news, but I just wanted to add my two cents. Everyone here was shocked and saddened by the death of Aaron Swartz this week. I had the pleasure of speaking with him a little over four years ago. I was getting close to shipping my first iOS app, and wanted to know if I could include some data from one of his sites in the application. Aaron was an incredibly smart, talented, and passionate human being, and I think we’re all a lot poorer for his passing.
On a more mundane note, it’s been a busy week here. We’ve been busy dealing with Rails security vulnerabilities, and rolling out a few new features.
First, submitting a new control that has a CocoaPod listing is now significantly faster: we’ll check and see if there’s a match for the URL you’re submitting in our CocoaPods records, and pre-fill most of the information you need if there is.
Second, I rolled out a new feature to collect all of the apps in the App Store that use a particular control. Let’s say that you’re using Evernote for iPhone, and want to know how they display little popover views on their maps. It turns out that if you dig deep enough through the app, you can find a list of acknowledgements that highlights their use of WEPopover, SMCalloutView, GPUImage, and—well—you can just look at the full list.
I’ve added a new Apps tab to the website, and also a new ‘Used In’ tab on control pages that have apps associated with them. If you want to add apps to your controls, just go to the control page and click the "I Use This Control" button on the right side. I’ll also be adding the ability to add new apps and multiple controls simultaneously to them soon. As always we’d love to know what you think of the feature, so please let us know.
I’d love to see our database become comprehensive, but there’s no way I can do it on my own. So please add your apps to controls you use! Also, to sweeten the deal, I’ll be featuring one app listed on the site in the roundup each week.
All the best,
Aaron
App of the Week
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To inaugurate our new app of the week section, I want to feature the absolutely beautiful Static by Jayson Lane. Static uses Florian Mielke’s FMMoveTableView to let you reorder table items by pressing and dragging. Static allows you to track how well you are doing in your favorite social channels. Just added an Instagram photo? Just published a blog post? How much traffic did you get as a result? How many new followers did you gain on Twitter? Instead of hopping back and forth between apps you can see your most important social stats from one screen. Static is an easy to use, beautiful display for monitoring the pulse of your social media accounts. Static costs a mere $0.99 and is worth every penny in my opinion. |
Control Roundup
Control of the Week: ZGParallelView
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Our control of the week, ZGParallelView, was written by Zhigang Fang. ZGParallelView is the easiest way to add a Parallax effect to a UITableView. It works perfectly with UITableViewController and is completely compatible with both UITableViewStyle.
Most importantly the head view is a full featured UIView: it can handle touch events, and you can even put a UIScrollView inside it. MIT licensed. |
TTSwitch
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TTSwitch is a UISwitch replacement built with images. You can now fully customize its appearance to whatever you want. It also adds block support when the switch value is changed. You can globally setup all the TTSwitch appearance using UIAppearance and then anytime you create an instance it will already be styled. Custom licensed. |
MPNotificationView
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An in-app notification view that mimics the iOS 6’s revolving notification views which appear above the status bar. MIT licensed. |
PATabBarController
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Container UIViewController that allows to present multiple view controllers when embedded in UINavigationController through the segmented control in the navigation item MIT licensed. |
SCPageScrubberBar
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SCPageScrubberBar is a page scrubber bar like ibooks. SCPageScrubberBar works with iOS5.0+ and ARC. BSD licensed. |
Two Finger Swipe WebView
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Two-finger (trackpad) or one-finger (Magic Mouse) support for back/forward in a WebView. Public Domain licensed. |
Greenscreen
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Composite arbitrary content onto a greenscreen on your iPad. MIT licensed. |
ACEDrawingView
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ACEDrawingView is a sample project showing exactly how to create a nice and smooth drawing application. In a few lines of code it supports drawing with different colors and line width. It also includes a full undo/redo stack and it can export the view as an UIImage. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
ALAssetsLibrary+CustomPhotoAlbum
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A nice ALAssetsLibrary category for saving images & videos into custom photo album. MIT licensed. |
UIBezierPath+Symbol
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Symbol extension for UIBezierPath class (UIBezierPath category). MIT licensed. |
NIDropDown
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A dropdown menu for iOS. Like a select box on the web. MIT licensed. |
ThumbnailListView
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Horizontally scrolling image list. MIT licensed. |
PPLabel
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UIlabel subclass with ability to detect touches on individual letters. The advantage os this implementation is that it uses the ability of UILabel to display NSAttributedString on iOS 6.0+. There is no hacking of the drawRect: or drawText: method of UILabel. MIT licensed. |
TTOpenInAppActivity
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TTOpenInAppActivity is a UIActivity subclass that provides an “Open In …” action to a UIActivityViewController. TTOpenInAppActivity uses an UIDocumentInteractionController to present all Apps than can handle the document specified with a file URL. MIT licensed. |