Hi everyone – it’s a big week for everyone in the iOS and OS X development community: a couple hours after our mailing list readers see this, Tim Cook, Phil Schiller and a variety of others will have given the WWDC keynote address. For everyone else, the keynote will be over by the time you see this (HINT: join our mailing list!)
In other news, we deployed a big update to Cocoa Controls over the weekend. The website should be significantly faster to load, now. Beyond that, we’ve finally added a login system. For now, it only works with OAuth via GitHub. Given what a large percentage of our content comes from GitHub, it seemed only sensible to support GitHub. Depending on what you folks want, we may eventually add a login/password system, too. I don’t think we’ll ever add Twitter or Facebook integration, though.
Log in, and check out the new system! You can now mark controls as favorites for easy later access, see which controls you’ve rated, and view all of the controls you’ve submitted to the site. We’ll be adding the ability to edit your own controls soon, too (the ones you created, not the ones you submitted). Also forthcoming is the ability to view where your controls are in our submission queue.
Please note: I’m sure there are some new bugs here and there on the site (because it’s software, after all). Please let us know if you run into any issues!
Changing gears, here are my thoughts on WWDC rumors, and what I think we’ll see:
For sure:
- iOS 6 and a beta of iOS 6 for developers
- Improvements to iCloud
- Facebook integration in iOS
- Tons and tons of awesome new APIs
- Mountain Lion release candidate
- Xcode 4.4
Pretty certain:
- A release date for Mountain Lion
- New hardware, especially MacBook Pros (ohpleaseohpleaseohplease let this be true, I really need a new laptop, and have been waiting for new hardware…)
- A 100% Apple-maintained mapping system
- A silver color scheme for iOS
Love to see it, seems likely, but maybe just wishful thinking:
- Siri APIs
- Apple TV SDK
- APIs for notification screen widgets
Not gonna happen:
- ‘The New iPhone’
- A TV from Apple
If an Apple TV SDK does ship, you can be certain that we’ll be publishing controls for that platform just as soon as the NDA lifts.
Best,
Aaron
Scroller
Our control of the week this week is ‘Scroller’ from Raw Engineering. Raw Engineering, you may recall, are the nice folks who wrote the original library I used for my Twitter iPad Ux post last year
Scroller is a novel way to interact with a list of data (specifically address book data in their demo). MIT licensed.
Find out more, or check it out on YouTube first
DMScrollingTicker
DMScrollingTicker is an advanced horizontal scroll ticker class for iOS. It doesn’t use standard NSTimer to perform animations but instead Quartz Layers/CoreGraphics. It allows you to load any set of UIView subclasses and add them to the scrolling queue with a simple call. MIT licensed.
Boilerplate Facebook app for iPhone
Ideal for novice developers, this app contains a few controls already assembled to handle Facebook login and basic navigation. Commercially licensed source code, $15.
KNMultiItemSelector
KNMultiItemSelector is a drop-in multiple items selector for iOS projects. It works with both iPhone and iPad. It is best used for selecting several items in a long list of hundreds or thousands of items such as contact list or Facebook friend lists. MIT licensed.
iPad Suggestions List
Easily display a popover on iPad with autocomplete suggestions for text fields. MIT licensed.
CPSlider
CPSlider is a drop-in replacement for UISlider that allows varying scrubbing speeds as the user drags away from the slider thumb, emulating the slider used in the iOS iPod music player. It also includes delegate callbacks to allow an object to be notified of scrubbing speed changes. MIT licensed.
FullScreenAnimations
Shows how to mimic the book-opening animation seen in apps like Path 2.0 on application launch. Unspecified license.
