Weekly Roundup

Aaron Brethorst, May 18, 2013

Hi folks, welcome to our weekly roundup! We’re getting close to WWDC time, and rumors are flying about hardware refreshes, delays to Apple’s unannounced iRadio service (how can an unannounced product be delayed as far as the public is concerned? I know, I know…), and—of course—the de-Forstallification of iOS 7.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is set to unveil the new Xbox (Fusion?) this coming Tuesday. Although it won’t ship until late Fall, I’m still extremely keen to see what Microsoft has been working on, and what direction they’re taking their UI in, now that they seem to be the drivers of industry UI trends (what the heck!). Also, I’m very curious to see what Alex Kipman, my former office mate1 and one of the key people behind Kinect, has been up to for the past couple years.

Until next time,
Aaron

1 Did you know I worked for Microsoft for four years and two days? It’s true! I worked on Visual Studio.


What We’re Reading


App of the Week: Seesaw

Seesaw

A very well-polished and executed app, Seesaw uses the perenially popular TTTAttributedLabel and PSTCollectionView controls.

The best way to get your friends’ opinions when you need them most. Seesaw lets you share photos of your choices via text message, Twitter, and Facebook. As your friends vote, you see results and opinions instantly. A fast, fun, and addictive way to feel confident about your decisions.

MIT licensed.

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Controls of the Week

PHFComposeBarView

PHFComposeBarView

This is a precise reconstruction of the compose bar from the iOS Messages.app, mimicking the behaviors and graphics while also allowing you to customize many aspects of it.

MIT licensed.

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MMDrawerController

MMDrawerController

A lightweight, easy-to-use side drawer navigation controller.

MMDrawerController is a side drawer navigation container view controller designed to support the growing number of applications that leverage the side drawer paradigm. This library is designed to exclusively support side drawer navigation in a light-weight, focused approach while exposing the ability to provide custom animations for presenting and dismissing the drawer.

MIT licensed.

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Weekly Roundup

GzCountryTableView

GzCountryTableView

A UITableView preloaded with all App Store countries and flags. It allows you to pick a country from a list or via search.

MIT licensed.

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PBWebViewController

PBWebViewController

PBWebViewController is a light-weight, simple and customizable web browser component for iOS. It’s just 2 source files, image-free, around 200 lines of code and has been built with modern Cocoa development techniques.

PBWebViewController works on iPhone and iPad, in all orientations and is meant to be used in a UINavigationController. All you need to do is set up it’s properties and then push it.

MIT licensed.

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SpiralPullToRefresh

SpiralPullToRefresh

Twitter Music-like pull-to-refresh controller but a bit more enhanced and flexible. Additionally, it supports 3 types of waiting animations: random flashing, linear flashing and circular flashing. Moreover particles gathering together using a galaxy/spiral animation.

MIT licensed.

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DMFormInputAccessoryView

DMFormInputAccessoryView

A simple input accessory view for use in forms.

MIT licensed.

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LARSBar

LARSBar

An oddly-named UISlider subclass which mimics the EQ slider found on Twitter’s #music app.

MIT licensed.

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BalloonPullToRefresh

BalloonPullToRefresh

Bubbles / Balloons pull-to-refresh control. Flexible and light. Moreover balloons gathering all together in one bigger ballon / bubble using galaxy / spiral animation. Two types of progress animations available: fading and spinning!

Checkout this control in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JjokI9d65k

MIT licensed.

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HMSideMenu

HMSideMenu

HMSideMenu allows you to display a menu of items that show from the left, right, top or bottom of a view controller with a delightful animation.

MIT licensed.

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SimulatorRemoteNotifications

SimulatorRemoteNotifications

SimulatorRemoteNotifications is an iOS library to send (fake) remote notifications to the iOS simulator.

License unspecified.

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Dragon Reaction

Dragon Reaction

A Cocoa Touch category that streamlines the code required to animate the movement (“dragging”) of a view associated with a UIGestureRecognizer as well as respond to conditions where said view overlaps with variable view frames (or arbitrary rectangles).

Apache 2.0 licensed.

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SimplySocial

SimplySocial

Simplified OAuth implementation that provides quick and dirty support for posting text and images to Facebook and Twitter.

Useful if you need to support social services on legacy apps back to iOS 4.3, or if you’re on iOS6, but users won’t be storing credentials on the device (i.e., at a trade show).

Unlike other social toolkits, SimplySocial requires no linking with additional iOS frameworks (other than UIKit, Foundation and CoreGraphics), so your codebase stays simple and your binary isn’t bloated with otherwise unnecessary libraries.

MIT licensed.

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METoast

METoast

METoast is a view to show toast message. It’s a queue based FIFO toast.

BSD licensed.

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Slash

Slash

A simple, extensible markup language for styling NSAttributedStrings. The language is similar in appearance to HTML, however the meaning of each tag is user-defined

MIT licensed.

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FontAwesomeKit

FontAwesomeKit

Simple helper for using Font-Awesome on iOS

MIT licensed.

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SHPersian

SHPersian

This is a set of tools and controls for Persian/Arabic iOS App developers.

Currently contains a custom subclass of UILabel to easily use your custom fonts, without writing a single line of code.

License unspecified.

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USStatesColorMap

USStatesColorMap

Control for drawing color USA states map in iPad, iPhone applications.
Based on Stately font (http://intridea.github.io/stately/).
Provides easy interface to fill one of states, group of states or fill whole map.

MIT licensed.

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BZPasscodeViewController

BZPasscodeViewController

Passcode view controller for iOS.

BSD licensed.

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BPODial

BPODial

A beautiful Dial / Volume Style Knob Control for Mac OS X. A replacement for the NSSlider Control.

MIT licensed.

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HPLTagCloudGenerator

HPLTagCloudGenerator

Generate tag clouds on iOS.

MIT licensed.

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ILHTTPClient

ILHTTPClient

A really easy-to-use wrapper around AFNetworking with an auto loading animated HUD.

MIT licensed.

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ScrollingNavigationViewController

ScrollingNavigationViewController

A Navigation Bar scroller like in the Amazon Kindle app for iOS.

MIT licensed.

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WritingAnimationMessageView

WritingAnimationMessageView

‘Writes’ out a message on-screen with a typing animation.

License unspecified.

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RBDMuteSwitch

RBDMuteSwitch

Prior to iOS 5 it was relatively straightforward to detect whether a device was muted by using an audio route to detect playback type.

But under iOS 5 this was changed as Apple never intended for this behaviour. In fact Apple have stated that there is no way to obtain the positioning of the mute switch and have stated that this is not a bug but an intentional change.

However RBDMuteSwitch is a simple, small and easy to use component that takes minutes to integrate, and will even work under previous versions of iOS.

BSD licensed.

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