A couple days ago, I posed a question on Twitter asking how many of you use CocoaPods (it actually got 17 replies. I’m not sure why Twitter is being weird about showing them). The consensus appears to be one of ‘yes’ or ‘soon’, with a handful of people who prefer Git submodules.
Currently, we allow you to tell us about apps of yours that use controls on the site, but there’s no way to say “here’s my app, and it uses these 10 controls,” or whatever. I’m looking at ways to make this easier, including but not limited to, allowing you to upload your Podfile and have us parse the contents. If we did that, would you use it?
We love knowing which apps are using which controls and highlighting apps that effectively use open source components, and we’re always looking for ways to reduce the friction. What do you think? If you’re reading on the blog, leave a comment. If you’re on our mailing list, hit reply.
cheers,
Aaron
What We’re Reading
- Good Old Fashioned Requirements for RubyMotion – MotionBundler should do a lot to make more pre-existing Rubygems ‘just work’ in Rubymotion. This is awesome.
- Layer Trees vs. Flat Drawing – Graphics Performance Across iOS Device Generations – A really detailed look at the performance of Core Graphics vs. CALayer. It also includes some interesting tidbits about relative graphics performance between devices. Well worth the read.
- Rumor: Jony Ive’s new look for iOS 7 and conjecture: Apple’s WWDC invite suddenly makes sense – some speculation on what we’ll see, literally and figuratively, in iOS 7 in a few weeks. It makes a reasonable amount of sense to me, although I don’t think past WWDC logos have necessarily indicated anything about the events.
App of the Week: Ranger Rick’s Tree House
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Man, this brings me back. I used to love to read Ranger Rick in the late 1980s. I’m delighted to see that Ranger Rick has made the jump onto the iPad, and that it uses a number of open source components from Cocoa Controls! Ranger Rick’s Tree House is like no other digital magazine for children ages 7–12. It’s a fun house, a reading corner, an arcade, a video screening room, and a comic book, all rolled into one! It’s totally interactive, highly innovative, and all about animals! |
Control of the Week: UIScrollSlidingPages
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Allows you to add multiple view controllers and have them scroll horizontally, with a header scroller (optional) that stays in sync with the content and shows next, current and previous items. A zoom out effect appears as you scroll between pages. Similar in style to the Groupon app or the horizontal scroller of the Twitter Music app. Check the Github page on the download link for more screenshots and a video of the control in action. MIT licensed. Find out more Add to Favorites See a Video Install Demo App (no really) |
NTPagedTableViewController
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A UITableView that ‘snaps’ like CC BY 3.0 licensed. |
UIImageViewModeScaleAspect Animation
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Animates a License unspecified. |
UIViewAnimationExplose
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Animate a UIView to full screen. See video for more. License unspecified. |
SHSPhoneComponent
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UITextField and NSFormatter subclasses for formatting phone numbers. Allow different formats for different countries(patterns). MIT licensed. |
ImageCropView
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A view that allows the user to select the cropping area in an image. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
GPActivityViewController
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Alternative to UIActivityViewController compatible with iOS 5.0. Partially based on REActivityViewController. MIT licensed. |
J1Button
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Simple scalable gradient buttons using images. Buttons include artwork for UIControl States: Normal, Highlighted, Selected, and Disabled. MIT licensed. |
NBUKit
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Customizable camera, assets, image editing, gallery, picker and UIKit subclasses Apache 2.0 licensed. |
MBTileParser
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MBTileParser is a cocos2d-iphone compatible game engine written using pure UIKit. MIT licensed. |
C360PopoverBackgroundView
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A tintable UIPopoverBackgroundView subclass which mimics the system popover appearance MIT licensed. |
MHCustomTabBarController
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Custom UITabBar replacement using storyboard and segues. MIT licensed. |
ITNavigationView
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An iOS-like navigation view driven by Core Animation. It can replace its subview with a slick animation. Custom licensed. |
RTFlyoutMenu
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MIT licensed. |
UIView+Shadow
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An UIView category that allow user to easily make inset shadow, customize the radius, alpha, color and directions. BSD licensed. |
NSAlert-Popover
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Category to run alerts within NSPopovers. BSD licensed. |
MDFaceDetector
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Demonstrates usage of MIT licensed. |
WTURLImageView
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WTURLImageView is a subclass of UIImageView that load images from Internet using AFNetworking. MIT licensed. |
UIView+EasingFunctions
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A category on UIView that allows to attach custom easing functions to animatable UIView properties. Public Domain licensed. |
SHStripeMenu
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A leftside menu that shows up either by tapping the stripes or swiping stripes to right. It can be used as an alternative to bottom tabs in the iOS application to gain maximum space. MIT licensed. |
ACEAutocompleteBar
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Simple MIT licensed. |