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Hi everyone, and welcome to our weekly roundup! It’s finally March, which means Spring is right around the corner, and with it, registration for Google and Apple’s annual developer conferences. Given the speed at which Google I/O sells out every year, and given that they open up registration at 7:00 AM US/Pacific, the odds of me attending this year are, once again, basically zero. Oh well.
As far as WWDC goes, you probably have another month or so before Apple announces the dates and allows registration. I doubt I’ll buy a ticket, but I’ll definitely make a point of spending a couple days in the Bay Area during the event. Honestly, I think that the informal meetups are the most valuable part of it anyway.
Are you going to be at WWDC? What’s your favorite part of the conference? Any predictions for this year? Let us know!
Until next time!
Aaron
App of the Week: Hunt the Monsters 2
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I can’t say I ever expected to be talking about a game as our app of the week, but the way that this one was built gives me no choice. The open source library that powers it is called UIKitForGame, and, as the name implies, it provides you with SNES (Super Famicom?) RPG-style effects entirely inside of UIKit. You might say this is crazy, but I say it’s crazy like a fox. Props to the creator, Tsutsumi Shuichi for building such a cool library and games. |
Control of the Week: PSTCollectionView
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Open Source, 100% API compatible replacement of UICollectionView for iOS4+. MIT licensed. |
Weekly Roundup
Moving Placeholder Text Field
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A UITextField subclass animating the placeholder text if it extends the bounds of the text field. It supports texts of any length, font and size (even custom fonts!). Speed defaults to 30 FPS. MIT licensed. |
SJOPaperboy
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An easy to use library that lets you implement background updates in your app that run whenever the user enters or exits a specified location. MIT licensed. |
ALScrollViewPaging
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This UIScrollView subclass offers a simple way to manage paging. Simply add an array with the different views to display. The page control dots color can be customized. MIT licensed. |
LBActionSheet
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A very customizable drop-in replacement for UIActionSheet. MIT licensed. |
MessagesViewController
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A messages UI for iPhone and iPad. MIT licensed. |
POHorizontalList
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App Store like horizontal view control that can be used in a UITableView MIT licensed. |
RFQuiltLayout
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RFQuiltLayout is a subclass of UICollectionViewLayout that positions various sized cells like a mason laying bricks.
MIT licensed. |
IBCellFlipSegue
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A simple custom segue created to imitate the animation shown on the main menu of the Expedia Hotels & Flight app. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
DWGridController
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The DWGridController allows you to display cells in a grid view where rows and columns can be (infinitely) scrolled seperatly MIT licensed. |
Color
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A collection of categories and utilities that extend UIColor. MIT licensed. |
FPPopover
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Alternative to the native iOS UIPopoverController, with iPhone support and look and feel customization. MIT licensed. |
Numberpad
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LNNumberpad is a custom numeric keyboard for the iPad which works with both UITextField’s and UITextView’s requiring no changes other than adding an instance of the LNNumberpad class as the inputView of the text field/view. MIT licensed. |
REMenu
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Dropdown menu inspired by Vine. MIT licensed. |
DPToastView
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Highly customizable toast view for iOS that features allows using attributed strings, supports word wrapping, device rotation, etc. Requires iOS >= 6.x; ARC; uses auto layout. MIT licensed. |
FSExtendedAlertKit
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Simple replacement for UIAlertView and UIActionSheet with block callbacks, and quick access to alerts with UIActivityIndicatorView and UIProgressView subviews. BSD licensed. |
TB_CircularSlider
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This is a circular slider to select a value from 0 to 360. The control is a subclass of UIControl and it is drawn using Core Graphics. I built this slider for a tutorial about building custom controls in iOS. You can find the full tutorial here: http://www.thinkandbuild.it/how-to-build-a-custom-control-in-ios/. Public Domain licensed. |
VideoPlayerKit
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A custom iOS video player with controls, progress bar, and airplay all set up. MIT licensed. |
Share This
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An iOS sharing tool that can be easily inserted into a project. Each share option can be individually called or you can show an option. On iOS 5, these options will be shown in action sheets. iOS 6+ will use the new activity view controller to handle the sharing. MIT licensed. |