Weekly Roundup: Playing Games

Aaron Brethorst, January 19, 2014

Although not directly related to iOS development, one of the most surprising and unfortunate pieces of news I read this past week was that Tobias Frere-Jones, one half of the renowned type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones was suing his business partner of 15 years for what he sees as his fair share of half of the company. One big takeaway for all of you folks doing contracting work or considering doing contracting work is that you should always get everything written down and signed. Never settle for a verbal agreement. It will inevitably come back to bite you.

In other, happier news, I was introduced to OCLint by way of a blog post on Etsy's website recently, and it's an unbelievably (if somewhat poorly documented tool) for tracking down issues in your code. I've played with it a bit and am looking forward to getting to take full advantage of it in an app I've been working on. Lastly, we have two super-cool controls of the week (and a ton more other new, awesome controls), and Margana, a beautifully-designed word game for iOS 7 that takes full advantage of Cocoa Controls :). I had the pleasure of beta testing Margana, and was honestly surprised when its creator, Melvin, opted to release it for free. (Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Melvin and I are buddies, but I would've featured Margana even if I had never met him.)

Best,
Aaron


What We're Reading


App of the Week: Margana

Margana

A delightful word game for iOS that takes advantage of no less than eight components from Cocoa Controls. It's a great example of how non-table view centric apps can still benefit from the depth and breadth of the iOS OSS community.

Margana is a fun anagram style word game for iPhone and iPad.

Find out more View in the App Store


Control(s) of the Week

BEMSimpleLineGraph

BEMSimpleLineGraph

iOS library to create simple line graphs/charts.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites  See a Video


UIImageView_FaceAwareFill

UIImageView_FaceAwareFill

This category applies Aspect Fill content mode to an image and if faces are detected it centers them instead of centring the image just by its geometrical center.

USAGE: Import the category to your .m file or to your "prefix" file.

#import "UIImageView+UIImageView_FaceAwareFill.h"

Then AFTER setting the image property of a UIImageView do:

[imageView faceAwareFill];

That's all.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites  See a Video


Weekly Roundup

VTAcknowledgementsViewController

VTAcknowledgementsViewController

Ready to use "Acknowledgements"/"Licenses"/"Credits" view controller for CocoaPods.

MIT licensed.

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FHSegmentedViewController

FHSegmentedViewController

Custom view controller container for swiching sub view controller with a segmented control

MIT licensed.

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iAppInfos

iAppInfos

iAppInfos provides easy access to a ton of important app and device information. For example:

  • Mobile provisioning info
  • iOS version
  • Device model
  • Free disk space
  • Memory available

and more.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


RSBarcodes

RSBarcodes

RSBarcodes allows you to scan 1D and 2D barcodes using metadata scanning capabilities introduced with iOS7 and generate the same set of barcode images for displaying and sharing.

MIT licensed.

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RubySugar

RubySugar

Ports Ruby syntactic sugar to Objective-C.

MIT licensed.

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MMSpinImageView

MMSpinImageView

A UIView to show 360 degree spin photography

MIT licensed.

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JGDetailScrubber

JGDetailScrubber

UISlider subclass with variable scrubbing speeds. Inspired by iOS Music app.

MIT licensed.

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DoAlertView

DoAlertView

A replacement for UIAlertView: block-based, customizable themes, and easy to use with image or map.

MIT licensed.

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HJRSeparatableView

HJRSeparatableView

An extended view with a single line separator like UITableViewCell.

MIT licensed.

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LMPaymentKit

LMPaymentKit

A maintained fork of PaymentKit from Stripe, updated for iOS 7

MIT licensed.

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PAPlaceholder

PAPlaceholder

When you're working on a new app, sometimes it's easier to start with dummy views and slowly replace them as you implement their functionality. Rather than use a simple UIView for this, PAPlaceholder gives you a better looking placeholder view that shows its dimensions and an optional title.

It also provides a dummy view controller which automatically creates the placeholder view. This is useful when you're using a view controller container such as a UITabBarController or a UISplitViewController.

BSD licensed.

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GRGlassWindow

GRGlassWindow

A NSWindow subclass with a beautiful glass-like title bar

BSD licensed.

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MagicPie

MagicPie

A powerful and easy to use pie chart control with fluid animations.

MIT licensed.

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BZGFormViewController

BZGFormViewController

A library for making dynamic forms.

MIT licensed.

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AssetLibraryMultiselect

AssetLibraryMultiselect

A media browser for ALAssetLibrary (iOS's photo library). Built on top of UICollectionView and nimbus's PagingScrollView, photo, and cache classes. Supports selecting multiple items, provisioning for long pressing items, and video playback.

MIT licensed.

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SGActionView

SGActionView

Combination alert view, table, and share view.

MIT licensed.

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JavaScriptBridge

JavaScriptBridge

Write iOS apps in Javascript!

JavaScriptBridge provides the way to write iOS apps with JavaScript in whole or in part. JavaScriptBridge bridges Cocoa touch to JavaScriptCore.

You get the power of dynamics of scripting language for your apps.

MIT licensed.

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KDropDownMultipleSelection

KDropDownMultipleSelection

Single or multiple selection in drop down list.

MIT licensed.

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ITProgressBar

ITProgressBar

ITProgressBar is a very lightweight progress bar replacement for Mac OS X

Apache 2.0 licensed.

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CFMagicEvents

CFMagicEvents

This trick was initially created to make an app for my children (available on appStore for free : "Incredible" App - US/EN/FR version).

This allows to use your back camera as a simple button.

Technically, frames are captured from the back camera, and a simple algorithm is checking the fall of luminosity due to passage of your finger.

MIT licensed.

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SKSTableView

SKSTableView

An expandable table view.

MIT licensed.

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TwitterCover

TwitterCover

TwitterCover is a parallax top view with real time blur effect to any UIScrollView, inspired by Twitter for iOS

MIT licensed.

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XMCircleType

XMCircleType

XMCircleTypeView is a UIView that allows you to display an NSString as a cicular text. Is will take font kerning into account, so no weird spacings.

MIT licensed.

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ProvisionQL

ProvisionQL

Quick Look plugin for .ipa and .mobileprovision

Inspired by number of existing alternatives, the goal of this project is to provide clean, reliable, current and open-source Quick Look plugin for iOS & OSX developers.

Thumbnails will show app icon for .ipa or expiring status and device count for .mobileprovision. Quick look preview will give a lot of information, including UUIDs, devices, certificates and much more.

Supporting file types:

  • .ipa - iOS packaged application
  • .app - iOS application bundle
  • .mobileprovision - iOS provisioning profile
  • .provisionprofile - OSX provisioning profile

Do not forget to check out these great alternatives:

MIT licensed.

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TWRProgressView

TWRProgressView

A custom view component that lets the user easily present a progress view masked with an image containing an alpha channel (i.e. PNGs). The view's progress can be animated; foreground and background colors can be customized as well as the duration of the animation.

MIT licensed.

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TGFoursquareLocationDetail

TGFoursquareLocationDetail

iOS project recreating Foursquare design and behaviour when presenting location details

Behaviour: When you scroll, image's shown area will become bigger. Like it appears on location detail page in Foursquare app. Also when you scroll up the UITableView, the header will automatically appear. At the opposite, if you scroll down it will fade away.

See gif at: http://i.imgur.com/8MdObWA.gif

License unspecified.

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