Weekly Roundup: Parallax Effects, Hybrid Apps, and a Drop-in Image Editor

Aaron Brethorst, November 23, 2013

A couple summers ago, I wrote a blog post detailing some of the pluses and minuses of hybrid apps on iOS. The conclusion I came to at the time was that, for the most part, they simply weren't worth it. Facebook agreed and released an incredibly well-done, well-reviewed native rewrite of their app. But, inevitably, things change, and I wonder if it's worth taking another look at hybrid native apps. But, perhaps with a bit of a twist this time around.

New web frameworks, like Ionic (linked-to below) promise native-like behavior on iOS, and Apple now offers the developers the ability to write application logic in JavaScript while still proffering up a native UI. (at least in theory...there's definitely some work required to build an interop layer between Cocoa and JavaScriptCore.) What do you think? Is there a future in writing native or hybrid apps in JavaScript on iOS? I sure hope so. Anything that will make the platform more accessible to more developers seems like a huge win to me.

On an unrelated subject, I highly recommend checking the "MultiPlane Camera" video below. It's only about 7 minutes long and will give you some great background on parallax effects, and how these were accomplished decades ago by cartoon makers. It's fascinating and informative, and well worth your time. Finally, our control of the week is really quite something: it's a full-fledged, feature rich image editor that you can just drop into your app.

Best,
Aaron


What We're Reading


Control of the Week

CLImageEditor

CLImageEditor

CLImageEditor provides basic image editing features to iPhone apps. This ViewController is simple to use, and is also possible to incorporate as part of the UIImagePickerController easily.

MIT licensed.

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Weekly Roundup

IQFeedbackView

IQFeedbackView

Feedback/BugReport iOS control

MIT licensed.

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RCHBackboard

RCHBackboard

Backboard menus, for all those (hamburger) menus we all love so much.

Wrap your application rootViewController in a containerViewController and add as many backboard menus as you need, set a view controller for each, a width to show on screen and the position to reveal from; top, left, bottom, or right.

License unspecified.

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SHEmailValidator

SHEmailValidator

An iOS library that will provide basic email syntax validation as well as provide suggestions for possible typos (for example, [email protected] would be corrected to [email protected]).

Apache 2.0 licensed.

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YASlidingViewController

YASlidingViewController

Yet Another SlidingViewController for iOS. Why did I create this? I have tried several other implementations that have failed to support any type of UIViewController and allow me to fully customize what I would like to do. The aim of this project is to allow all this to be available.

ToDo: Add RightViewController Allow to adjust peak threshold.

MIT licensed.

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PanToBack

PanToBack

Pan gesture To Back Naivigating in iOS App

Gif Screenshot HERE https://github.com/soleaf/PanToBack/raw/master/screenshot.gif

MIT licensed.

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UIImage+BlurredFrame

UIImage+BlurredFrame

UIImage+BlurredFrame is a UIImage category that blurs an specified frame of a UIImage

MIT licensed.

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MDHTMLLabel

MDHTMLLabel

MDHTMLLabel is a lightweight, easy to use class for rendering text containing HTML tags on iOS 6.0+. It behaves almost exactly the same as UILabel and allows you to fully customize its appearence with added features thanks to CoreText. It also lets you handle when a user taps or holds down a link in the label unlike many similar libraries.

It provides:

  • Link interaction
  • Auto-detection of URLs not wrapped in anchor tags
  • Bold and italic text styles
  • Color and stroke styles
  • Indentation, kerning and line spacing settings
  • Text shadow styles

MIT licensed.

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DrawReport

DrawReport

Report UI issues by shaking your device to draw and annotate them.

Sometimes your meticulous user finds a bug in your iOS app's awesome and magnificent UI but does not know how to report it. Now it's easy to do with DrawReport - a small library for iOS app development process. Simply integrate it, shake your device and try to draw something!

This library is for app's testing/beta stage only. Check it before release your app.

MIT licensed.

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AMScrollingNavbar

AMScrollingNavbar

Scrollable UINavigationBar that follows the scrolling of a scrolling view (e.g. UIScrollView, UITableView or UIWebView). Similiar to Chrome or Facebook for iOS7.

MIT licensed.

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DDHTextView

DDHTextView

A UITextView subclass which lets you move the cursor and select text with a pan gesture.

MIT licensed.

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UAObfuscatedString

UAObfuscatedString

A simple NSStringCategory to hide sensitive strings from appearing in your binary

MIT licensed.

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APTimeZones

APTimeZones

The easiest way to get an NSTimeZone from CLLocation.

MIT licensed.

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ARAutocompleteTextView

ARAutocompleteTextView

ARAutocompleteTextView is a subclass of UITextView that automatically displays text suggestions in real-time. This is perfect for automatically suggesting the domain as a user types an email address, #hashtag or @alexruperez.

MIT licensed.

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URBMediaFocusViewController

URBMediaFocusViewController

An easy-to-use view controller that animates thumbnail previews of your media to their full size versions with physics similar to Tweetbot 3.

MIT licensed.

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MSDynamicsDrawerViewController

MSDynamicsDrawerViewController

Container view controller that leverages UIKit Dynamics to provide a realistic drawer navigation paradigm.

Here's some example gifs to see MSDynamicsDrawerViewController in action:

You can fling it, bounce it, open & close it, and replace it.

MIT licensed.

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SFSCollectionMenu

SFSCollectionMenu

An open-source menu control for iOS utilizing UICollectionView layout.

MIT licensed.

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QTree-objc

QTree-objc

Library for location-based clustering of data using Quadtree written in Objective-C.

MIT licensed.

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UzysCircularProgressPullToRefresh

UzysCircularProgressPullToRefresh

Give Pinterest Like PullToRefresh to any UIScrollView with just simple code

UzysSlideMenu features:

It's very simple to use. Support iOS7. Support only ARC Support CocoaPods. (to be)

MIT licensed.

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KXKiOS7ColorsAndGradients

KXKiOS7ColorsAndGradients

A collection of colors and gradients taken from Apple's iOS 7 Apps and icons.

MIT licensed.

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IQActionSheetPickerView

IQActionSheetPickerView

ActionSheet with UIPickerView

MIT licensed.

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IQDropDownTextField

IQDropDownTextField

TextField with DropDown support using UIPickerView

MIT licensed.

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IQEditableLabel

IQEditableLabel

UILabel with UIKeyInput protocol implementation

MIT licensed.

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