Weekly Roundup

Aaron Brethorst, April 06, 2013

Welcome to our weekly roundup! In addition to our regular features, we have a list of interesting articles and links from around the web for your entertainment and edification. Check it out! Coming up next week, we’ll have our first in a series of interviews with notable folks from the iOS developer community. Know someone we should feature? Drop us a line to let us know. We’ll also have a fantastic look at combining AFNetworking with ReactiveCocoa.

Cheers,
Aaron


What we’re reading

  • The Making of Vinylogue – an incredibly in-depth look at using GitHub’s ReactiveCocoa extensions in an iOS app, among many other things. A long read, but well worth your time
  • Delivering iOS Push Notifications with Node.js – EngineYard does a deep-dive into building a Node.js-based APNs server.
  • Helios Framework – Mattt’s newest project is a Ruby-based, Sinatra and Rails-compatible backend framework for iOS apps.
  • Mixpanel Trends – It’s traditionally been extremely difficult to get an aggregate view of iOS version trends. This past week, Mixpanel rolled out their Trends page, which features OS version data across all of the mobile apps that use their service. Very useful.

Control of the Week: MSPullToRefreshController

MSPullToRefreshController

Allows you to have implement a “pull to refresh” control on any UIScrollView. Why is better than other implementations?

  • It’s unintrusive, and simply observes the content offset of the scroll view.
  • You can provide custom views.
  • You can provide custom behaviors to the “refresh” cycle! AKA Once pulled past a certain offset, you can perform anything you want!

With this you can literally implement any “pull-to-refresh” library with the 6 delegates inside!

NOTE: This library was created by the wonderful team of https://github.com/bONchON and https://github.com/timothy1ee from GoMiso.

MIT licensed.

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Weekly Roundup

ADSlidingViewController

ADSlidingViewController

An easy to use sliding view controller packed full of features. Supports all iOS devices that can run >= iOS 5.

MIT licensed.

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BubbleThingie

BubbleThingie

Image bubbles for iOS messaging.

MIT licensed.

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Proper data models with JSONModel

Proper data models with JSONModel

Every other app or so use some kind of either JSON feed or a JSON based API for its backed. Few though are built to be robust, stable and performant; the proper way to work with JSON is to use data models to fit the Cocoa MVC workflow. JSONModel gives you smart models, networking and smart API client for free. And it is also cross platform – iOS or OSX it’s all good :]

Save yourself tons of lines of code and gain control of your JSON based communication.

MIT licensed.

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TWStatus

TWStatus

Show notification status on Status bar mimicking Sunrise and Mailbox.

MIT licensed.

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MTTestSemaphore

MTTestSemaphore

A class to help you create unit tests that test asynchronous methods. You will need this to unit test any class that fetch data from the network, use location, camera, etc.

MIT licensed.

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LBReadingTime

LBReadingTime

UITextView category to compute the total reading time or remaining reading time + UITextView indicator’s panel showing the remaing reading time.

MIT licensed.

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DOTabbar

DOTabbar

Lightweight and customizable tab bar control with support for grouping items for Mac OSX.

MIT licensed.

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CLFContainerViewController

CLFContainerViewController

CLFContainerViewController makes it much easier to create custom container view controllers.

With this class, you can create container view controllers whose children occupy the entire bounds of the container. For example, your subclass could mimic a UINavigationController, a UITabBarController, or a UIPageViewController, though you are certainly not limited to recreating already existing containers.

The view controller hierarchy, the view hierarchy, and the view appearance calls are all managed by the base class, so you won’t have to worry about any of those details when creating your custom container class. Instead, you can focus on how your container will look and act.

MIT licensed.

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RKCropImageController

RKCropImageController

This is modal-style crop image controller that supports zooming.
Zoom an image with your image to select crop frame more accurately

Apache 2.0 licensed.

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APExtendedPageController

APExtendedPageController

A view controller scrolling experience inspired by Google Chrome.

License unspecified.

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Letterpress Explosion

Letterpress Explosion

Letterpress like explosion.

Category on UIView called explode, that will take the uiview and explode it into pieces.

Not exactly the same as letterpress but will point people to the right direction.

MIT licensed.

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M6ParallaxController

M6ParallaxController

Parallax controller for a parallaxed view and a table view

Apache 2.0 licensed.

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