Over the past couple of years, I've developed a small arsenal of tools that are incredibly important for me as an iOS developer. Some are pretty obvious: GitHub, Instruments, Reflector, and Spark Inspector, for instance. Others are less well-known, or more subtle: GitHub's Objective-C trending page, objc.io, and...Twitter.
Yes, really, Twitter. I think it's the best way to stay up to date on the latest happenings in the iOS developer community, and—as long as you're careful about who you follow—can offer an incredibly high signal-to-noise ratio.
Twitter reached its 8th anniversary this past week, and launched the First Tweet microsite to help you find your (or anyone else's) first tweet. I've been quite enamored with seeing what people first wrote, whether a meta tweet ('I'm tweeting about tweeting!'), something far more mundane, or a heartfelt look into someone's personal life. Here are some of my favorites. What are yours?
just setting up my twttr
— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 21, 2006oh dear god, i finally joined twittr...err twitter.
— Aaron Brethorst (@aaronbrethorst) March 17, 2007Pull-to-Refresh TableView for iOS: As pioneered in Twitter for iPhone (née Tweetie 2), pull the t... - http://bit.ly/dOgkHg
— Cocoa Controls (@cocoacontrols) February 27, 2011Giving the boy a bath.
— John Gruber (@gruber) December 1, 2006wasting time on the web while Lucy works
— Craig Hockenberry (@chockenberry) December 2, 2006Programming.
— Brent Simmons (@brentsimmons) January 17, 2007Until next time,
Aaron
What We're Reading
- How I Evaluate Third-Party Dependencies
- The Origin of Tweet
- Colors of the iOS7 App Store
- Jonathan Ive Interview
- Empathy
- Smaller, please
Control of the Week
RPSlidingMenu
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A collection view menu in the style of UltraVisual. MIT licensed. |
Weekly Roundup
EMCarousel
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EMCarousel is an simple and easy-to-use 3D carousel for iOS app. MIT licensed. |
PICircularDialer
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This is simple app to show the old circular style telephone dial. Currently it just stores 4 digit number and then checks it for confirmation. License unspecified. |
UIImage-DecompressAndMap
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iOS library for quickly displaying images while scrolling MIT licensed. |
SNImagePicker
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Custom image picker for quickly select multiple photos or movies. License unspecified. |
ActiveRecord
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A lightweight Active Record implementation for Core Data. MIT licensed. |
FinderSyrahUI
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An experiment showing how Finder might look like on the next OSX. BSD licensed. |
AWCollectionViewDialLayout
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UICollectionViewLayout for displaying cells in a semi-circle with a nice fish eye effect. Very handy for quickly browsing items with your left thumb without having some of the content hidden behind your finger while you scroll. MIT licensed. |
KKActionSheet
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Subclass of UIActionSheet for setting text color in buttons for given indexes MIT licensed. |
ParticleButton
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UIButton with particle effects. MIT licensed. |
NRTextTransitions
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Basic block-based text transitions. MIT licensed. |
NTCoreData
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NTCoreData is small library that helps perform saves and fetches asynchronously. Each save and fetch is done asynchronously. All heavy lifting regarding managing threads and context is done by NTDatabase class. This library was inspired by this article by Florian Kugler. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
UIFontWDCustomLoader
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An iOS custom font loader MIT licensed. |
RBCollectionViewBalancedColumnLayout
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A custom UICollectionViewLayout that displays your cells in columns that are balanced for height. Instead of telling the layout how many columns you want, just tell it the width of your cells and it'll figure out the best way to display them for you. MIT licensed. |
PWProgressView
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Circular progress view overlay MIT licensed. |
SHPieChartView
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a reusable UIView subclass to create Pie Charts. MIT licensed. |
AFSpritz
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A complete Spritz SDK for iOS. Spritz is a brand new revolutionary reading method, that will help you out to improve your number of words per minute (wpm). MIT licensed. |
MVFollow
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MVFollow is a lightweight drop-in solution that allows you to follow people on Twitter. MIT licensed. |
HandwritingTextField
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A UITextField category that supports handwriting input. MIT licensed. |
TPFloatRatingView
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A simple rating view with whole, half or floating point values. I couldn't find anything that easily set floating point ratings, so I made this control based on the Ray Wenderlich tutorial found here: http://www.raywenderlich.com/1768/uiview-tutorial-for-ios-how-to-make-a-custom-uiview-in-ios-5-a-5-star-rating-view MIT licensed. |
Tesseract
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Tesseract OCR iOS is a Framework for iOS5+, compiled also for armv7s and arm64. iOS7 Ready. Tesseract is probably the most accurate open source OCR engine available. Combined with the Leptonica Image Processing Library it can read a wide variety of image formats and convert them to text in over 60 languages. MIT licensed. |
RealtimeChat
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RealtimeChat is a full native iPhone app to create realtime, text based chatrooms with Facebook/Twitter login. MIT licensed. |
SKAnimateScroll
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Infinitely scroll images. MIT licensed. |
DKImageBrowser
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iOS Image Browser with a Thumbnail Strip MIT licensed. |
Localisator
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A custom localisator class which allows to change the app language without having to restart it. MIT licensed. |
JJTabBarController
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Custom tab bar controller with support for:
MIT licensed. |
HVColorSelector
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A color selector for iOS. Here is a link to the wiki page where you can see the screenshots: MIT licensed. |
NTSlidingViewController
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NTSlidingViewController is right-and-left sliding view controller container MIT licensed. |