Welcome to our weekly roundup! This coming week, we'll see Apple's final round of product announcements for calendar year 2013. And, as always, the event promises to not disappoint. Whether you're looking for new Mac Pros, the release of Mavericks, MacBook Pros, iPads mini and otherwise, you're undoubtedly in for a treat! It's even possible, depending on how reliable you consider MG Siegler's sources to be, that we'll see a new Apple TV hardware announcement.
I don't know if we'll see Apple TV hardware on Tuesday, but I'm also not that excited for just any old hardware update. Ultimately, it's the software that will really matter, and a cursory glance at the headers for the iOS variant powering AppleTV v6.0 reveals that new framework support for things like game controllers is presently missing. I'd be surprised if Apple was simply holding these back for a 6.1 release for fourth generation hardware, but stranger things have happened.
I think we'll eventually see a future Apple TV powered by an A7 or A7 variant chip that includes enough addressable RAM to make the CPU's 64-bit support seem obvious and inevitable, but whether that happens weeks before or months after the Xbox One and PS4 ship is a question we'll know the answer to on Tuesday. I'm most excited for a new retina iPad mini, as my 3rd generation iPad's starting to show its age. (fingers crossed!)
Best,
Aaron
What We're Reading
- iOS 7 User-Experience Appraisal
- Apple Expected to Announce iPad Updates at Event Next Week
- Apple Ups Its Fashion Cred, Names Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts As SVP Of Retail And Online Stores
- More about scaling in [Mobile Safari for] iOS
- Code Signing and Mavericks
App of the Week
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Google Translate uses Nimbus, a modern, well-documented partial replacement for Three20, under the hood. Break through language barriers with Google Translate: Translate text between more than 70 languages; Listen to your translations spoken aloud; Directly translate speech and handwriting; Star your favorite translations for quick access even when you're offline. |
Control of the Week
FunctionalReactivePixels
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A demonstration of how to use FRP with ReactiveCocoa in an iOS context using the 500px API. MIT licensed. |
Weekly Roundup
UIScrollViewContentAccessors
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Category for UIScrollView which make easier to access UIScrollView's content properties in iOS. MIT licensed. |
KHFlatButton
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Flat Button inspired by FlatButton and Instagram's flat button palette but with a few more added convenience methods and refactoring for iOS 7 support and customization. Also has better support for button methods. It's also available as a cocoapod. MIT licensed. |
GMSMessageWindow
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Simple Sprite Kit-based gaming message presentation ala 8-bit text cutscenes. Simple to showcase SKActions on SKLabelNodes. MIT licensed. |
Vertigo
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Vertigo is a simple image viewer which includes a custom view controller transition that mimics the new iOS 7 Photos app image zoom transition effect. MIT licensed. |
7blur
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iOS 7 introduces a new efficient snapshot API. The 7blur project builds on these frameworks to produce Control Center and Notification Center like blur effects enforcing the 3rd design pattern of depth for iOS 7 apps. 7blur supports both two styles of blur, two styles of positioning and many blur color components. Supported blurs:
Supported positioning:
Blur color components:
By combining the attributes above one can produce many desired visual effects and human interfaces. 7blur only has a handful of API tasks and the view content can be visually edited in Interface Builder for productivity. Get started with the sample project today. MIT licensed. |
ALMoviePlayerController
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A drop-in replacement for MPMoviePlayerController that exposes the UI elements and allows for maximum customization. MIT licensed. |
PXAlertView
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PXAlertView is a UIAlertView replacement similar to the style in iOS 7 but with a block based API and the ability to customise the styling and add custom views. MIT licensed. |
ProgressHUD
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ProgressHUD is a lightweight and easy-to-use HUD for iOS 7 (written in Objective-C). MIT licensed. |
DTAlertView
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Custom alert view solved the ios UIAlertView can't addSubview problem at iOS7. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
SCSlidingViewController
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A UIViewController that replicates similar functionality to ECSlidingViewController (screenshot thanks to http://dribbble.com/oykun). MIT licensed. |
JVFloatLabeledTextField
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UITextField subclass with floating labels - inspired by Matt D. Smith's design: http://dribbble.com/shots/1254439--GIF-Mobile-Form-Interaction?list=users MIT licensed. |
C360NavigationBar
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A subclass of UINavigationBar with a solid appearance. It has two advantages over a stock opaque UINavigationBar:
MIT licensed. |
OWUProximityManager
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Detect and connect to nearby devices with iBeacons and CoreBluetooth. OWUProximityManager class provides a simple interface to abstract away the CLLocationManager, CBPeripheralManager, CBCentralManager and CBPeripheral delegate spaghetti. MIT licensed. |