A Brief Retrospective
When I launched Cocoa Controls back in January, I did it because I kept losing track of all the cool open-source iOS components that I had found on GitHub, and needed a place to stash them. Furthermore, I hoped that with a little luck, lots of new controls would simply come to me! Finally, I expected that there were probably a few other people out there with a similar need as me.
As it works out, I have been absolutely blown away by the response I’ve seen to the site: hundreds of thousands of page views per month, hundreds of controls listed on the site, and about 850 Twitter followers (and growing). Needless to say, the site has been more successful than I could have ever hoped for. I’m starting to take stock about how we can take the site to the next level (yes, including dumping Facebook comments…that is still coming, I promise :D), and make it more useful for everyone.
Two Bright Ideas (and hopefully many more from you!)
One request I keep hearing over and over again is adding support for closed-source or dual-licensed code. For example, on occasion I have run across projects that are licensed under the GPL for non-commercial uses and a proprietary license for commercial use. Making it easier for the developers of these projects to both feature and profit from their work on Cocoa Controls seems like it would be a big win for everyone involved.
The other thing I’ve been asked about repeatedly is offering up some real analytics data to control developers, including page views, click-throughs to the project repository, and graphs of watchers and forks on GitHub over time. Would this be of interest to anyone?
Additionally, what do you think would make Cocoa Controls even better? What is it missing right now that would make you significantly happier or more productive with the site?
In any of the above cases, what do you think about this? Like it, don’t like it, think I should take it in a completely different direction? Please sound off in the comments or email me at [email protected].
As always, thanks in advance for your feedback!
Aaron