Hello everyone, and welcome to your weekly Cocoa Controls roundup! It’s been an exciting week for Mac developers with the unexpected announcement and Beta release of OS X Mountain Lion. Some of the new features, like Gatekeeper, are certainly not unexpected. This Cocoa developer, for one, is pleased that Apple has announced a reasonably middle-of-the-road approach that balances security with usability.
Perhaps one of the biggest surprises in Mountain Lion is what Apple did not announce: Siri. The existence of the feature for iOS was a poorly guarded feature up until the announcement of the iPhone 4S. It’s possible Apple is simply biding its time until WWDC. We’ll see.
Until next time,
Aaron
What We’re Reading
- Download OS X Mountain Lion Preview – Odds are that you’ve already downloaded it, but registered Mac Developer Program members can download the OS X Mountain Lion Preview now.
- Twilio announces iOS SDK 1.0 – Twilio has released version 1.0 of their iOS SDK, which will help you build awesome VOIP apps that use their platform.
- Gatekeeper in Depth – A look at what you need to know about Gatekeeper if you plan on writing software for OS X.
- How To Create A Simple 2D iPhone Game with OpenGL ES 2.0 and GLKit Part 1 – A very in-depth tutorial for aspiring iOS game developers on how to get started building your 2D iPhone masterpiece.
AJComboBox
AJComboBox is a drop-in combo box for your iOS apps modeled after Android’s version of the control. Apache 2.0 licensed.
AGMedallionView
AGMedallionView is a image view that looks just like the one used on the Lion login screen. GPL licensed.
SJNotificationViewController
Notifications slide up from the bottom of whatever view they’re attached to and slide back down when you or the user are done with them. Great for indicating that something is happening (a feed is being refreshed, for example) or that something has just happened (there was an error sending something, for example) without throwing up a UIAlertView.
You can customize the notification text, the notification level (which affects the background color of the notification — red for error, blue for message, and green for success), the target/selector that’s fired when the user taps the notification, and whether or not the notification has a spinner. BSD licensed.
NRGridView
A grid view component built as a static library. Its API was designed to resemble UITableView’s as closely as possible, including its delegate and data source. The grid control also allows you to set a layout style, toggling the grid between a horizontal or vertical layout. MIT licensed.
MNMProgressBar
MNMProgressBar is a custom progress bar view that shows determinate and indeterminate progress. BSD licensed.
CurledViews Category
An easy-to-use pair of categories for UIButton and UIImageView. The categories allow you to easily add an image, border, curl, and shadow to your UIButtons and UIImageViews. Apache 2.0 licensed.
JTGestureBasedTableViewDemo
Next up is our super-duper cool Control of the Week. If you’ve paid any attention to Mac or iOS news websites over the past week or two, you’ve probably heard a lot of people talking about the super-snazzy task management app, Clear.
Enterprising iOS developer, James Tang, recreated the core experience and released the source code on GitHub under the very permissive MIT license.
Find out more, or watch the demo video on YouTube (I highly recommend watching the video for this one):
JSAnimatedImagesView
A UIView subclass that lets you easily create an animated photo carousel. You provide images via delegation, and the view cycles through them with pretty transitions. Unspecified license.
Pegasus
Pegasus is a very interesting project that lets you specify UIKit layouts and view hierarchies in XML for instantiation at runtime. Apache 2.0 licensed.
EEToolbarCenterButton
EEToolbarCenterButton lets you easily add a featured button to the center of a UIToolbar. It handles button alignment, and helps you use button images whose height is larger than UIToolbar height. MIT licensed.
DAAutoScroll
This project is a collection of UIScrollView subclasses that allows you to automatically scroll a UIScrollView with adjustable speed. MIT licensed.
JBTabBarController
JBTabBarController is a drop-in replacement of UITabBarController that gives developers far greater control over its appearance than the built-in version. The layer styles used to create the TabBar images are included with the project. The project uses ARC and targets iOS 4.0+ devices. MIT licensed.
