Weekly Roundup: Goto Fail

Aaron Brethorst, February 22, 2014

If you haven't updated to iOS 7.0.6 and OS X 10.9.2 on all of your devices, drop everything and do it now.

Last week saw the release of iOS 6.1.6 and 7.0.6, which fix an incredibly simple and scary bug. The best writeup of it that I've seen so far comes from Adam Langley, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, who notes the presence of an aptly named, and horrifically unnecessary goto fail statement in some SSL certificate verification code. For what it's worth (and as Gruber points out), the use of curly braces would've demonstrated the bug to anyone giving a cursory glance to the file, or rendered it entirely moot.

Meanwhile, Facebook this past week countered what they must have seen as an existential threat to their business with the announcement of a $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp. WhatsApp, with 450 million users around the world, is apparently growing at more than 1 million users per day, and will probably end the year with as many users as Facebook itself has. $19 billion is a staggering amount of money, but it's worth noting that spending ~13% of the market cap of your business is worth it if the alternative is seeing the annihilation of your business. Think of this as being similar to the Instagram acquisition... The only real problem is that, ostensibly, Facebook can't buy out every potential rival.

Following up on my thoughts about Microsoft from last week is a report that the price of Windows will be slashed by 70% on cheaper (i.e. less than $250) portable devices. Apparently, the purpose of this is to protect the Windows ecosystem from the existential threat posed by Chromebooks. Yeah, I laughed at that too.

And, last but not least, it sounds like TestFlight may be going the way of the dodo in short order. I'm still baffled about why they never charged money for their product. Lately, I've been using HockeyApp, and I generally like it, not least because they charge money for their service.

Until next time,
Aaron


Control of the Week

SimpleFormatLanguage

SimpleFormatLanguage

An intuitive and powerful replacement for Cocoa Auto Layout visual format language

Custom licensed.

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Weekly Roundup

M13OrderedDictionary

M13OrderedDictionary

M13OrderedDictionary is a cross between NSArray and NSDictionary. It holds an ordered list of objects and keys. All of which can be accessed by index, or key. This class is the only fully implemented ordered dictionary class for Objective C. It follows Apple's subclassing protocols for NSArray and NSDictionary. It has methods comparable to all of NSArray's methods and all of NSDictionary's methods. It also supports NSCoding, NSCopying, KVO, and supports NSFastEnumeration over the objects or keys.

MIT licensed.

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NTMonthYearPicker

NTMonthYearPicker

NTMonthYearPicker is a simple month / year picker component for use in iOS applications.

The standard iOS UIDatePicker component only allows you to specify full dates (i.e. day, month and year), but you can use NTMonthYearPicker in cases where you need the user to specify only the month and the year, or only the year.

NTMonthYearPicker is a drop-in replacement for UIDatePicker; it extends UIControl, exactly like UIDatePicker does, and re-implements all relevant functionality.

MIT licensed.

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RMDownloadIndicator

RMDownloadIndicator

RMDownloadIndicator is a visual display for downloading of files. It displays the amount of file download as a pie chart just like the app download from the app store in iOS . The colors, radius percent are all customizable.

MIT licensed.

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IQDatabaseManager

IQDatabaseManager

IQDatabaseManager contains CoreData helper classes with convenience methods to communicate with CoreData for performing common tasks (inserting+updating+deleting+sorting+searching) on database records.

IQDatabaseManager Features:-

1) Convenience methods to Insert, Update, Delete records.

2) Convenience methods to do Searching and Sorting.

I created a subclass called MyDatabaseManager for demo purpose.

MIT licensed.

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PinPad

PinPad

A lock screen view controller styled to look like iOS 7's. Dynamic count of numbers. Control includes shake and error view.

License unspecified.

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MRCircularProgressView

MRCircularProgressView

Custom circular UIView that allow set progress similar to AppStore control.

MIT licensed.

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InstagramKit

InstagramKit

A neat little blocks-based Objective C wrapper for the Instagram API.

It readily parses the JSON responses on a background thread and does the dirty work for you so you just have to deal with Instagram model objects. Built atop AFNetworking.

MIT licensed.

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CCKFNavDrawer

CCKFNavDrawer

CCKFNavDrawer is a custom navigation controller that provides an Android-style navigation drawer.

MIT licensed.

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ValidateIt

ValidateIt

IOS Form Validation Library

MIT licensed.

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IQURLConnection

IQURLConnection

A replacement of sendAsynchronousRequest of NSURLConnection with ResponseBlock, ProgressBlock & CompletionBlock

MIT licensed.

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WMGaugeView

WMGaugeView

Highly customizable gauge control for iOS.

MIT licensed.

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DCOAboutWindow

DCOAboutWindow

A replacement for the standard Mac app About dialog.

Easily link to your apps website and display acknowledgements separately from your credits.

BSD licensed.

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ARObjectCollectionViewController

ARObjectCollectionViewController

UIViewController that can present a JSON NSString, JSON NSData, JSON URL, XML NSData, XML URL, RSS NSData, RSS URL, NSDictionary, NSArray, NSSet, UIImage EXIF Metadata...

MIT licensed.

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DBCamera

DBCamera

DBCamera is a simple custom photo camera with AVFoundation

MIT licensed.

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DropboxBrowser

DropboxBrowser

Browse and download files using the iOS Dropbox SDK in iOS Objective-C Apps. DropboxBrowser has a beautiful interface, simple code, and lots of features.

Dropbox Browser provides a simple and effective way to browse, view, and download files using the iOS Dropbox SDK. Add the required files to your Xcode iOS project, setup Dropbox, add one simple method and a navigation controller and now you've got a wonderful View Controller that lets users browse their Dropbox files and folders, and even download them.

MIT licensed.

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GameCenterManager

GameCenterManager

GameCenterManager helps to manage Game Center in iOS and Mac apps. Report and track high scores, achievements, and challenges for different players. GameCenterManager also takes care of the heavy lifting - checking internet availability, saving data when offline and uploading it when online, etc. It also makes it easy to setup and run live Game Center Multiplayer matches.

MIT licensed.

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MHVideoPhotoGallery

MHVideoPhotoGallery

Gallery for iOS 7 Devices. A mix of the iOS Gallery and the Facebook Gallery. I took the best from the best. Have Fun.

MIT licensed.

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WishlistAnimation

WishlistAnimation

iOS App Store's "Add to Wish List" animation

License unspecified.

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NVCalendar

NVCalendar

NVCalendar is simply 2*2 view to display months,you can click on any date with beautiful animation.

MIT licensed.

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SBPickerSelector

SBPickerSelector

Easy framework to setup pickers in your app. -numerical, date and text pickers

MIT licensed.

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HAPaperViewController

HAPaperViewController

UICollectionView with layout transitions inspired by Facebook Paper App

MIT licensed.

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XHPathCover

XHPathCover

XHPathCover is pull down refresh and a parallax top view with real time blur effect to any UITableView, inspired by Path for iOS.

MIT licensed.

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YUTableView

YUTableView

Subclass of UITableView which adds expandable sub-menu support to it.

MIT licensed.

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RCCPeakableImageView

RCCPeakableImageView

Implementation of a "peekable" thumbnail image as shown at the „Flag" Kickstarter Project https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1306413684/flag-the-app-that-prints-and-mails-your-photos-for

MIT licensed.

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CRMotionView

CRMotionView

A custom photo viewer that implements device motion scrolling, inspired by Facebook Paper.

MIT licensed.

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UITextField-Shake

UITextField-Shake

UITextField category that adds a shake animation like the password field of the OsX login screen.

MIT licensed.

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MWWindow

MWWindow

Lightweight library that allows you to manage multiple windows in an iOS application and animate the transitions.

The demo application shows how to reproduce a transition like the Paper Facebook application.

MIT licensed.

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SCAudioVideoRecorder

SCAudioVideoRecorder

An easy Vine like video and/or audio recorder class and a camera engine in Objective-C.

These classes allow the recording of a video with pause/resume function. Although the project was initially made for the sake of taking videos only, you can now take pictures as well with some very useful utility functions that make the project totally suitable for a standalone camera engine. They are straightforward to use, only a few lines of code is needed to start recording.

Framework needed:

  • AssetsLibrary

Apache 2.0 licensed.

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MXLMediaView

MXLMediaView

This is a class designed to show a UIImage and blur & shrink the background. Similar to the Facebook app.

MIT licensed.

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JZRefreshControl

JZRefreshControl

JZRefreshControl is an easily extendable class that makes it dead simple to create a custom refresh control that will have your users so engaged they'll be opening your app and pulling to refresh night and day.

MIT licensed.

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BKDateAndTimePickerView

BKDateAndTimePickerView

Date and time picker are seperate pickers provided by iOS but with this custom control you can select both at the same time.

MIT licensed.

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CardViewSample

CardViewSample

Cards View Sample is simple app for creating cards and swipe them over each other.

Custom licensed.

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