Howdy everyone – Welcome to another weekly roundup! We have a pretty exciting week planned behind the scenes here at Cocoa Controls. It’s always seemed somewhat ironic to me that the Cocoa Controls website isn’t very navigable on the iPhone. You have to do a lot more zooming and scrolling than you really should. To that end, since the release of Twitter’s Bootstrap 2 on the 31st, we’ve been moving the site onto Bootstrap 2, and are excited to say that we should have it deployed later this week. The immediate changes will be relatively superficial, but it will pave the way for a responsive, iPhone-compatible UI in the very near future.
Additionally, as you saw in last week’s roundup, we have a new ‘What We’re Reading’ section. We’ll be adding this to the site this week, and looking to solicit links from you sometime soon. I’m excited to see all of the terrific links to content you run across, and I’m sure the Cocoa developer community will be too!
What We’re Reading
Here are some of our favorite links from the past week:
- 5 year old analyzes logos – Not related to iOS development, but I learned something seeing brands through the eyes of a child.
- Continuous Deployment for iOS apps – A brief run-through of how to get a continuous deployment system up and running for your apps.
- Obvious Engine AR SDK – A very cool demo of a new augmented reality engine for iOS apps.
- Uicons – icons for apps and stuff – A big set of icons available for free under the CC-BY license, or you can pay $25 for the vector versions and drop the attribution requirement.
Android Pattern Lock on iPhone
Grio, a consulting firm in the Bay Area, recently released a snazzy recreation of Android’s pattern unlock experience for iOS. Of course, there’s no way for you to replace iOS’ pin unlock system with something of your own creation (maybe you can via jailbreaking, I dunno…), but if you need to include PIN unlocking inside of your app, this would not be a bad way to differentiate yourself. This control is available under Apache 2.0 or BSD.
VPPDropDown
VPPDropDown, from Víctor Pena, is an iOS control that allows you to create Tweetie-like dropdowns in a table view, may it rest in peace. VPPDropDown’s license is, unfortunately, unspecified, but I opened up an issue on GitHub asking Victor to add one.
UIImage+Sprite
UIImage+Sprite, from Rafal Sroka, is a snazzy category for UIImage that can extract sprites from a sheet for playback in an animated loop. MIT licensed.
PullToRefreshTransform
As you may have seen earlier on the blog, this next control is our control of the week! Meet PullToRefreshTransform, from Tom Irving, a Cocoa developer whose work we’ve had the pleasure of featuring before.
PullToRefreshTransform shows you how perform a snazzy version of the (now fairly standard) pull to refresh action using CATransform3D to create an ‘unfolding’ effect. I should point out that, in order to integrate this into your app, you will need to do some work, as this is more of a code sample than a reusable control. Nevertheless, I think it’s cool and novel enough that it deserves a showing here. Also, the source code does not specify a license at present, but I’ve opened up an issue on GitHub asking Tom to clarify the licensing situation. Hope you like!
Go check out the source code, or see it on YouTube, first:
YRDropdownView
YRDropdownView, from Eli Perkins, and based in part on MKInfoPanel, among others, is a cool-looking alternative to UIAlertViews. MIT Licensed.
YLProgressBar
YLProgressBar, by Yannick Loriot, is a gorgeous-looking custom progress bar implemented entirely with CoreGraphics, which means it should be super-easy to swap in your own color palette (although I have to say, I think that for the right app, the magenta/purple combination could actually look excellent).
