Hello, and welcome to our weekly roundup! Undoubtedly, the biggest news this past week is that, after 13 years as CEO, Steve Ballmer will be stepping down for the top spot at Microsoft in the next 12 months. Although revenue at Microsoft has quadrupled under Steve, the stock price has declined 40% from January 2000 - August 2013. To be fair, though, that includes external events like the dot-com bubble bursting. If, instead, you look at the period from January 2002 - August 2013, the stock has literally remained flat. IBM, in comparison, is up 50% in the same timeframe, and Apple is up an astonishing 4,367%.
Check out the video in What We're Reading to see Steve's reaction to the iPhone after its announcement. Of course, no one could've predicted that the iPhone would be as successful as it's turned out to be, but even still, it obviously marked a sea change in the way that mobile phones would look and work, and Microsoft was simply caught flat-footed. They've done a great job with Windows Phone, but it appears to be too little, too late. Nine times out of ten when I see someone (in Seattle) with a Windows Phone, it turns out that they're Microsoft employees.
For better or worse, the absolute dominance of the PC is coming to an end, and, while Apple may not be the 'winner' in the devices space, it seems clear that Microsoft definitely will be a loser.
Best,
Aaron
What We're Reading
- Mobile App Discovery: A definite need for speed
- AFNetworking 2.0 RC2 - Check out what's coming in AFNetworking 2.0
- The Best in User Onboarding - General tips and tricks on how to effectively onboard new users
- At Apple, Tim Cook leads a quiet cultural revolution - A look at Tim Cook and how he's transforming Apple
- XCTool - A command line build tool from Facebook that fixes lots of issues with xcodebuild
- Ballmer Laughs at iPhone - Yeah, ok, this is a cheap shot, but it encapsulates so much that went wrong at Microsoft.
App of the Week
Albumatic is a fun and simple way to collect photos of everything you love into shareable, collaborative albums.
|
Control of the Week
TWSReleaseNotesView
Weekly Roundup
HKCircularProgressView
A simple discrete/continuous circular progress view with current/max properties, customizable appearance and animatable. MIT licensed. |
MZFormSheetController
EKWelcomeView
EKWelcomeView is a solution to implement entry view in application for your needs - e.g. for tutorial or hints of how to use your application. MIT licensed. |
RMEIdeasPullToSort Control
RMEIdeasPullToSort control allows users to perform multiple custom actions when a UIScrollView is dragged to have a negative content offset. Although this control would work with any UIScrollView and can be used to trigger any type of action, it naturally lends itself to sort operations in UITableViews - hence the name RMEIdeasPullToSort control. Please see http://rme-ideas.com/blog/2013/7/31/uitableview-pull-to-sort-control MIT licensed. |
DRImagePlaceholderHelper
iOS placeholder images made simple. MIT licensed. |
PListTableViewController
Subclass of UITableViewController to show items of not only NSArray but also NSDictionary. MIT licensed. |
IADownloadManager
iOS download manager, Download a set of files in parallel and sequential order. A Minimalist download manager for iOS Download a set of files in parallel or sequential order. MIT licensed. |
OSNavigationController
PPImageScrollingTableViewCell
PPImageScrollingTableViewCell is a UITableViewCell subclass that can make images scrollable horizontally in TableView. MIT licensed. |
ADFlipTransition
MSCMoreOptionTableViewCell
Tap Pad
Generate interesting musical patterns on iOS using basic rules of cellular automatons. Just tap on the grid to get started. Note: this is a universal iPhone and iPad app. MIT licensed. |
SvpplyTable
Expandable and collapsable Menu using UITableView, like Svpply. MIT licensed. |
Zuckerkit
A wrapper around the Facebook SDK that makes common tasks easy. MIT licensed. |
ATTabandHoldAudioRecord
Tab hold and record with voice visualization wave and LED effects with ARC support. F3BarGauge and F3PlotStrip third party support. MIT licensed. |
ZCImagePickerController
Drop in replacement of UIImagePickerController. Add mutiple selection feature. MIT licensed. |
UITextViewExtras
ALAlertBanner
Clean and simple alert (or notification) banners for iPhone and iPad. Multiple configurations and options available. iOS 5.0+ tested. MIT licensed. |
PPiFlatSegmentedControl
Custom, flat-styled segmented control with support for the Font Awesome icon font library. MIT licensed. |