Weekly Roundup: Auto Layout tutorial video, free gesture graphics, and much more!

Aaron Brethorst, December 14, 2013

The holiday season is upon us, and—regardless of how you may celebrate it—it bears repeating that you will not be celebrating it by releasing new versions of your apps in the App Store. The annual iTunes Connect shutdown is less than a week away, so either get your apps in pronto or hang onto them until the 27th!

Our "What We're Reading" section is a bit mislabeled this week. Half of what you'll find aren't articles, but instead are videos from Seattle's Xcoders meetup and a collection of free touch gesture icons, which would be perfect to pair with an in situ help or hints system in your apps (like perhaps RCHGestureGuide). Make sure you spend some time checking out the videos. For instance, I think that—even though it predates iOS 7—the Auto Layout video, from the Omni Group's Kyle Sluder, is particularly fantastic, and one of the best explanations for how the whole thing works that I've ever heard.

Finally, I want to thank HelpShift for sponsoring this week's roundup. If you haven't tried out their in-app help system before, I highly recommend giving it a try, especially now that they offer it for free for apps with 10,000 or less MAU.

Best,
Aaron


Sponsored by HelpShift

We're delighted to have Helpshift back as our sponsor this week. Check out their new CocoaPod for even faster integration into your iOS apps:


pod 'Helpshift', '~> 4.0.0'

Helpshift is the first help desk built for iOS and Android apps.

Message your users in-app. Enable self-service with native FAQs. Get 5-star reviews.

I've tried out Helpshift and I must say I couldn't be happier. It is, by far, the best support system I've used for my apps, and the easiest to integrate.

Click here to get Helpshift free for up to 10,000 Monthly Active Users


What We're Reading


Control of the Week

EFCircularSlider

EFCircularSlider

An extensible circular slider for iOS applications

MIT licensed.

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Weekly Roundup

BidirectionalCollectionView

BidirectionalCollectionView

A customized collection view using UICollectionView and UITableView supporting vertical and horizontal scrolling.

MIT licensed.

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HVTableView

HVTableView

UITableView with expand/collapse feature (fully animatable)

This is a subclass of UITableView with expand/collapse feature that may come so handy in many apps. The developer can save a lot of time using an expand/collapse tableView instead of creating a detail viewController for every cell. This means that the details of each cell can be displayed immediately on the same table without switching to another view. On the other hand, in my opinion it's far more impressive and eye-catching in compare to the traditional master details tableview.

MIT licensed.

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AAShareBubbles

AAShareBubbles

Animated social share buttons control for iOS. For now supports 6 share buttons: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Vkontakte, E-mail

MIT licensed.

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DMCustomTransitions

DMCustomTransitions

Custom transitions for iOS 7: Scale, Alpha, and Slide.

MIT licensed.

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AMDraggableBlurView

AMDraggableBlurView

Draggable blurred view. This control is inspired by the brilliant work of César Pinto Castillo's AMBlurView

MIT licensed.

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RKTabView

RKTabView

Easy applicable toolbar/tabbar component for iOS.

RKTabView provides the opportunity to create toolbars with customizable behavior, functions and appearance. Standard iOS components such as UITabBar or UIToolbar sometimes are not customizable as needed and always behave in a certain way. Unlike them, this component can be installed anywhere, anytime, but the most important thing - all elements appearance and behavior can differ. Imagine, that part of bar should work as UITabBar(one is on - others are off), elements of second part should work as switchers(any element can be turned on or off independently), third part - ordinary buttons. All this can be done with RKTabView.

MIT licensed.

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MZGraph

MZGraph

This is a simple graph. Easy to Implement and Customize.

Public Domain licensed.

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YCTaskManager

YCTaskManager

A simple open source iPhone app for managing UILocalNotifications. Notifications are displayed with UITableViewCells and can be canceled/deleted using the standardized swipe to delete method.

License unspecified.

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PBGroupScrollController

PBGroupScrollController

Controller that allows great user experiance when scrolling CollectionView down and up. Instead of classic scrolling it offers scroll whole page. Inspired by Feedly app.

MIT licensed.

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SLCountryPicker

SLCountryPicker

Country picker for iOS 7, with built-in search and dynamic text support.

MIT licensed.

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GraphController

GraphController

iTunes Style - Horizontal Bar Graph - A complete collection of subclasses and controller classes to make any WebView a custom iTunes style horizontal graph. You can style this graph with CSS. All transitions and animations are done via CSS3. No images required.

MIT licensed.

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SKInputClass

SKInputClass

SKInputClass provides simplest way to add 'Done' button or any symbol when using numeric keyboard

Developer just need to change class of UITextfield to SKDigitField and that set :)

MIT licensed.

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RFFavicon

RFFavicon

RFFavicon retrieves the relevant favicon for a URL, or returns a default icon should it not be able to find it.

How To Get Started
  1. Download RFFavicon
  2. #import "RFFavicon.h"
  3. Use the class method,Ex:

self.icon.image = [RFFavicon getIcon:www.google.com];

Public Domain licensed.

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RFShortURL

RFShortURL

RFShortURL provides free URL redirection service. Turns a long URL into a much shorter one.

Service provided by http://tinyurl.com

How To Get Started

  1. Download RFShortURL

  2. #import "RFShortURL.h"

  3. Create an instance of RFShortURL and set yourself as the delegate, then just listen for a response using the delegate method receivedUrl:

Ex:

self.smallUrl = [[ RFShortURL alloc] init];

[self.smallUrl setDelegate:self];

[self.smallUrl shortURL:@"www.cnn.com"];

Then we just listen:

-(void)receivedUrl:(NSString *)url fromOriginalUrl:(NSString *)originalUrl

{

self.displayShortUrl.text = url;

NSLog(@"Original URL: %@ Received Short URL: %@", originalUrl,url);

}

Public Domain licensed.

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TH-NavigationStack

TH-NavigationStack

A control that organizes multiple navigation controllers in a stack with search option in both the states.

MIT licensed.

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WeixinActivity

WeixinActivity

An iOS 6 UIActivity subclass implementing uploads to Weixin(WeChat)

MIT licensed.

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Objective-C Regex Categories

Objective-C Regex Categories

This project is a collection of objective-c categories for NSRegularExpression and NSString that make usage easier and more concise.

//Using NSRegularExpression
NSString* string = @"I have 2 dogs.";
NSRegularExpression *regex = [NSRegularExpression
    regularExpressionWithPattern:@"\\d+"
    options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive
    error:&error];

NSTextCheckingResult *match = [regex firstMatchInString:string
     options:0
     range:NSMakeRange(0, [string length])];

BOOL isMatch = match != nil;

// Using this library
BOOL isMatch = [@"I have 2 dogs." isMatch:RX(@"\\d+")];

.

Learn more at: https://github.com/bendytree/Objective-C-RegEx-Categories

MIT licensed.

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CoreLocationUtils

CoreLocationUtils

A category with convenient methods for CLLocation.

MIT licensed.

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Sol

Sol

Sol°, is a weather app for iOS. Requires iOS 7.

MIT licensed.

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YSViewer

YSViewer

Image Viewer like Tweetbot 3

MIT licensed.

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NRTouchPoints

NRTouchPoints

UIWindow subclass that simulates users touches on screen. I wanted to be able to record a tutorial for the users of my apps. When I had Jailbreak, that was possible, but with a non-jailbroken phone, this gets complicated. The solution I found was to use Reflector App to record the screen, but this option would not show where exactly the user tapped. So what was the solution for my solution? To create a subclass of UIWindow that shows where the user is tapping in the moment. Ah, don't forget to remove them when sending your app to the AppStore!

Also available via CocoaPods

MIT licensed.

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