Weekly Roundup

Aaron Brethorst, August 24, 2013

Hello, and welcome to our weekly roundup! Undoubtedly, the biggest news this past week is that, after 13 years as CEO, Steve Ballmer will be stepping down for the top spot at Microsoft in the next 12 months. Although revenue at Microsoft has quadrupled under Steve, the stock price has declined 40% from January 2000 - August 2013. To be fair, though, that includes external events like the dot-com bubble bursting. If, instead, you look at the period from January 2002 - August 2013, the stock has literally remained flat. IBM, in comparison, is up 50% in the same timeframe, and Apple is up an astonishing 4,367%.

Check out the video in What We're Reading to see Steve's reaction to the iPhone after its announcement. Of course, no one could've predicted that the iPhone would be as successful as it's turned out to be, but even still, it obviously marked a sea change in the way that mobile phones would look and work, and Microsoft was simply caught flat-footed. They've done a great job with Windows Phone, but it appears to be too little, too late. Nine times out of ten when I see someone (in Seattle) with a Windows Phone, it turns out that they're Microsoft employees.

For better or worse, the absolute dominance of the PC is coming to an end, and, while Apple may not be the 'winner' in the devices space, it seems clear that Microsoft definitely will be a loser.

Best,
Aaron


What We're Reading


App of the Week

Albumatic
Albumatic is a fun and simple way to collect photos of everything you love into shareable, collaborative albums.

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Control of the Week

TWSReleaseNotesView

TWSReleaseNotesView

Among other crazy features, iOS 7 enables users to have automatic updates for their apps, wiping away the infamous App Store badge. This is really convenient both for users and developers, but it comes with a couple of downsides:

  • users are not aware about the changes introduced in the latest update, unless they explicitly open the App Store page to check the release notes;
  • developers who spend their time working on well-written release notes lose their chance to inform and communicate with their users.

TWSReleaseNotesView is a simple way to address those issues. It comes with a straightforward API which enables developers to show in-app release notes with a fully customizable popup view, either setting the release notes list manually or loading them directly from your app's App Store page.

MIT licensed.

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Weekly Roundup

HKCircularProgressView

HKCircularProgressView

A simple discrete/continuous circular progress view with current/max properties, customizable appearance and animatable.

MIT licensed.

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MZFormSheetController

MZFormSheetController

MZFormSheetController provides an alternative to the native iOS UIModalPresentationFormSheet, adding support for iPhone and additional opportunities to setup controller size and feel form sheet.

MIT licensed.

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EKWelcomeView

EKWelcomeView

EKWelcomeView is a solution to implement entry view in application for your needs - e.g. for tutorial or hints of how to use your application.

MIT licensed.

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RMEIdeasPullToSort Control

RMEIdeasPullToSort Control

RMEIdeasPullToSort control allows users to perform multiple custom actions when a UIScrollView is dragged to have a negative content offset. Although this control would work with any UIScrollView and can be used to trigger any type of action, it naturally lends itself to sort operations in UITableViews - hence the name RMEIdeasPullToSort control.

Please see http://rme-ideas.com/blog/2013/7/31/uitableview-pull-to-sort-control

MIT licensed.

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DRImagePlaceholderHelper

DRImagePlaceholderHelper

iOS placeholder images made simple.

MIT licensed.

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PListTableViewController

PListTableViewController

Subclass of UITableViewController to show items of not only NSArray but also NSDictionary.

MIT licensed.

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IADownloadManager

IADownloadManager

iOS download manager, Download a set of files in parallel and sequential order.

A Minimalist download manager for iOS

Download a set of files in parallel or sequential order.

MIT licensed.

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OSNavigationController

OSNavigationController

OSNavigationController is a open source re-implementation of UINavigationController. It currently features only a subset of the functionality of UINavigationController, but the long-term aim is to replicate 100% of the features.

OSNavigationController is not really intended to be used as-is. The idea is that you can fork it and then easily customize its appearance and behaviour to suit any special requirements that your app may have. Customizing OSNavigationController is much simpler than trying to customize UINavigationController due to the fact that the code is open and you don't need to worry about private methods, undocumented behavior, or implementation changes between versions.

zlib licensed.

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PPImageScrollingTableViewCell

PPImageScrollingTableViewCell

PPImageScrollingTableViewCell is a UITableViewCell subclass that can make images scrollable horizontally in TableView.

MIT licensed.

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ADFlipTransition

ADFlipTransition

An alternative presentation animation for iOS. Mimics the flip animation from the iOS iTunes/App Store.

Contains categories on UIViewController, UICollectionViewController and UITableViewController for super simple use.

MIT licensed.

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MSCMoreOptionTableViewCell

MSCMoreOptionTableViewCell

Drop-in solution to achieve the "More" button in an UITableView's "swipe to delete"-menu by extending Apple's own implemtation and not rewriting it, so UITableView's standard behaviour isn't changed.

  • The "More" button is customizable through delegate methods
  • Compatible to Storyboards (see included demo project)

MIT licensed.

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Tap Pad

Tap Pad

Generate interesting musical patterns on iOS using basic rules of cellular automatons. Just tap on the grid to get started.

Note: this is a universal iPhone and iPad app.

MIT licensed.

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SvpplyTable

SvpplyTable

Expandable and collapsable Menu using UITableView, like Svpply.

MIT licensed.

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Zuckerkit

Zuckerkit

A wrapper around the Facebook SDK that makes common tasks easy.

MIT licensed.

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ATTabandHoldAudioRecord

ATTabandHoldAudioRecord

Tab hold and record with voice visualization wave and LED effects with ARC support. F3BarGauge and F3PlotStrip third party support.

MIT licensed.

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ZCImagePickerController

ZCImagePickerController

Drop in replacement of UIImagePickerController. Add mutiple selection feature.

MIT licensed.

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UITextViewExtras

UITextViewExtras

Collection of convenience methods for finding the paths and locations of text in UITextView.

  • Calculate the bounding path (or CGRect) of a character, word, sentence, line or paragraph at given point, index, or range.

  • Hit test a substring range.

  • Find the closest character index to a point

  • Find the nearest range for character,word,line,sentence or paragraph at given point.

  • Calculate the substring range bound by a given CGRect.

** and a few others...

Currently used in Drag Pad and Fire Type.

MIT licensed.

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ALAlertBanner

ALAlertBanner

Clean and simple alert (or notification) banners for iPhone and iPad. Multiple configurations and options available. iOS 5.0+ tested.

MIT licensed.

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PPiFlatSegmentedControl

PPiFlatSegmentedControl

Custom, flat-styled segmented control with support for the Font Awesome icon font library.

MIT licensed.

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MotionGestureRecognizers

MotionGestureRecognizers

MotionGestures is a simple, multi-platform gesture recognition library for Leap Motion that mimics the UIGestureRecognizer classes of iOS. Build powerful, gesture driven OS X apps with this simple abstraction layer for Leap Motion.

BSD licensed.

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JCAppleScript

JCAppleScript

A simple, helpful library for using your Objective-C variables within a bundled AppleScript or OSAScript.

Apple provides NSAppleScript and OSAKit for executing AppleScript in Cocoa, but there is no clear way to execute a script with variables from your Objective-C code, unless you do a long-ass [NSString stringWithFormat:]

JCAppleScript attempts to provide a simple, sane way of adding AppleScript files to you App bundle and executing them while optionally inserting your Objective-C variables into the script before executing.

Example Usage:

In MyScript.scpt

tell application "Finder"
    display dialog $0 $1
end tell
In Your Objective-C Class

NSArray *myVariables = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"Hello", @"World", nil];
[JCAppleScript runAppleScript:@"MyScript" withVariables:myVariables;

MIT licensed.

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