Last week, an article entitled Programming Sucks made the rounds in my circles. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend dropping everything and spending the next 15 minutes reading it. Although it adopts a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, hyperbolic attitude towards the failings of our craft, there is enough truth in passages like the following to make me simultaneously laugh, cry, and die a little inside:
You immerse yourself in a world of total meaninglessness where all that matters is a little series of numbers went into a giant labyrinth of symbols and a different series of numbers or a picture of a kitten came out the other end.
To be clear, this isn't to say that software development is meaningless or pointless. Far from it, in fact! Software development it is literally vital to modern society, and that is exactly why pulling back from it at times in order to gain perspective on what it really means and how it affects the world around us is so important.
Maintaining perspective will make you a better software developer, and that is why I will now bid you adieu for this week to go develop a roll of film and make prints in a darkroom.
Best,
Aaron
What We're Reading
- Design
- Code
- Biz
Control of the Week
STXDynamicTableView
An Instagram-inspired table view to display a photo stream. STXDynamicTableView is designed to solve the common use case to display a feed of photos with their corresponding likes, caption, and comments. http://engineering.2359media.net/blog/2014/04/16/rebuilding-instagram-feed-table-view/ MIT licensed. |
Weekly Roundup
RGBColorSlider
AHKActionSheet
A MIT licensed. |
M13ContextMenu
TWRBorderedView
A custom UIView subclass to easily turn on drawing of each single border on a view. MIT licensed. |
GraphKit
A lightweight library of animated charts for iOS. Super easy to customize individual bar/line color, animation durations and more. Demo: pod try GraphKit MIT licensed. |
CADRACSwippeableCell
Swippeable UICollectionViewCell subclass made with Reactive Cocoa. MIT licensed. |
RTFacebookAlbum
Easy to use library to get album and photos from a user's Facebook account. MIT licensed. |
AppearanceMaker
Create custom appearances to customize your app's look with NSAppearance BSD licensed. |
DKScrollingTabController
Scrolling tab control for iOS. MIT licensed. |
RPBorderlessSegmentedControl
A replica of Xcode 5's toolbar segmented controls. MIT licensed. |
RBImagePickerController
This controller can be used to pick one or more images from the photo library. MIT licensed. |
NSString+Color
iTunesPicker
THPinViewController
DIDatepicker
Yet another datepicker for iOS. MIT licensed. |
UICollectionViewLeftAlignedLayout
A layout for UICollectionView that aligns the cells to the left MIT licensed. |
OMAMovingAnnotations
Moving annotations for iOS MapView MIT licensed. |
Metronome
A metronome application that does the job. It uses a given Beats Per Minute (BPM) and Beats Per Circle (BPC) to generate tick and tock sounds. MIT licensed. |
Panorama
implementation of the photo tilt gesture/UX found in Facebook's Paper app. MIT licensed. |
UICollectionViewRightAlignedLayout
A layout for UICollectionView that aligns the cells to the right. MIT licensed. |
UITableView-Wave
animation uitableview reload with wave Custom licensed. |
GBFlatButton
A flat and light implementation of UIButton for iOS MIT licensed. |
CPKenburnsSlideshowView
Inspired by Hey Day.
MIT licensed. |
AFWeather
Getting the weather forecast never has been so easy MIT licensed. |
Pie Chart
Simeple pie chart on Mac OS X License unspecified. |
AZNotification
Secret Viewer
A quick recreation of the Secret Viewer from the Secret app with dynamic blur, parallax and expanding images during scroll. MIT licensed. |
FFCalendar
Yearly, Monthly, Weekly and Daily Calendars for iOS. MIT licensed. |
AMSmoothAlert
MONActivityIndicatorView
An awesome custom activity indicator view for iOS. MIT licensed. |
ChartView
DChartView is a customized line chart for any representation, it's built with CoreGraphics so no need to worry about load on you application. GPL licensed. |
FrameExtractor
This demo application extracts frames from videos. GPL licensed. |
eLBeeIsolator
Isolate a UITableViewCell. This example uses a longpress, but you can use whatever you want. There are additional libraries included with this code including:
MIT licensed. |