Weekly Roundup: Other Obsessions

Aaron Brethorst, November 16, 2013

You might not know this about me, but when I'm not slinging Ruby or Objective-C code, I'm almost certain to have a camera in my hands. I try not to obsess about photography gear too much because a) what's behind the viewfinder is more important than what's immediately in front of it, and b) it can get very expensive very quickly. But, I'm certainly not immune to the allure of new stuff. Lately, my obsessions have been proceeding in two rather divergent directions: a new-found appreciation for film, and capturing motion in a still frame.

The second obsession is why I was excited recently to discover a Kickstarter campaign for gear that should make it incredibly easy to trigger your camera in response to external events, like a laser sensor being tripped, a sound above a certain decibel level occurring, or a bright flash appearing. As it happens, the Triggertrap Kickstarter campaign ended Saturday morning (which is the same time when I write these posts), and when I sat down to find an App of the Week, I was delighted to find the Triggertrap iOS app had been added to our list of apps.

The sheer number of open-source components, the rate at which new ones come in, and the unexpected places where these controls get used never ceases to amaze me.

Do your apps use components from Cocoa Controls? You should find the pages for the controls you use, click the Apps tab, and add a link back to your app on the App Store. I love featuring cool apps that make use of the site, and would love feature yours!

Best,
Aaron

p.s. I normally wouldn't engage in this kind of flagrant self-promotion, but I feel like I should share a macro photo I took last week that ended up being the 52nd most popular photo on Flickr the next day. Check it out, along with the setup shot.


What We're Reading


App of the Week

Triggertrap

This nifty app connects to your camera by way of a fairly cheap dongle to provide you with a ton of features like timelapse and sound detection exposures.

Trigger your built-in camera or your SLR camera with your iPhone/iPod/iPad, using a whole ton of different triggering modes.

Find out more


Control of the Week

JFOpenWeatherMapManager

JFOpenWeatherMapManager

Objective-C iOS / Mac OS X Wrapper to allow easy manipulation of the Open Weather Map API

Access Weather data directly as Objective-C objects with only a few lines of code

Original post: http://jonathanfield.me/objective-c-openweathermap-api-wrapper/

MIT licensed.

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Weekly Roundup

JCMenu

JCMenu

An expanding button menu control.

MIT licensed.

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MIBAboutController

MIBAboutController

A simple tableview for static content, optimized for 'About' views.

MIT licensed.

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RAMCollectionViewFlemishBondLayout

RAMCollectionViewFlemishBondLayout

RAMCollectionViewFlemishBondLayout is a UICollectionViewLayout subclass for displaying cells in groups (highlighting one of them) with optional header and footer views. Highlighted cell occupy much of the space and the remaining cells occupy space equally.

MIT licensed.

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LCPickerView

LCPickerView

A simple table view-based modal picker control.

MIT licensed.

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KASlideShow

KASlideShow

Lightweight slideshow for iOS (ARC only). Support manual or automatic slideshow, with fade and slide transitions.

Apache 2.0 licensed.

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APPaginalTableView

APPaginalTableView

It is implementation of view allowing navigation between views like in iOS 7 Weather App.

MIT licensed.

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TINavigationView

TINavigationView

Vertical breadcrumb navigation menu view.

MIT licensed.

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OVGap

OVGap

A lightweight framework which is responsible for the communication between IOS native Objective-C code and Javascript.

Apache 2.0 licensed.

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UIScrollView+ScrollIndicator

UIScrollView+ScrollIndicator

Customizable scroll indicator implemented as a category on UIScrollView.

MIT licensed.

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LLACircularProgressView

LLACircularProgressView

An iOS7 style circular progress view with a stop button.

  • Animated progress display
  • Stop button
  • Respects iOS7 interface tint color
  • Automatically dims the tint color when an alert view or an action sheet is presented
  • iOS6 an iOS7 compatible

MIT licensed.

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SKSlideViewController

SKSlideViewController

SKSlideViewController is an easy to use, slide-to-navigate view controller for ios 6.0 +. It enables you to present a main view controller and an optional, direction-sensitive accessory view controller. It is easy to setup and modify.

MIT licensed.

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BkTask

BkTask

An asynchronous workflow library for iOS inspired by the Proactor and Reactor design patterns. It is designed with two concepts in mind, asynchronous and modular.

Doing work asynchronously allows to keep your application responsive. But parallel programming is hard. On iOS, tools like GCD and NSOperation makes it much simpler but, for complex workflows it still takes time and resources to achieve. BkTask allows you to simply run workflows in background and be notified once it is done.

MIT licensed.

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SWGradientTabBar

SWGradientTabBar

A simple UITabBar with gradients, motivated by CRGradientNavigationBar. Apply gradients vertically or horizontally.

MIT licensed.

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ALSystemUtilities

ALSystemUtilities

This library provides a lot of methods to get system information. You can check the RAM, the disk space, the active processes, the number of processors, informations about the carrier, the hardware and other info.

The screenshot shows the app ALSystem that is downloadable on the App Store and uses this library.

MIT licensed.

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JDStatusBarNotification

JDStatusBarNotification

Easy, customizable notifications displayed on top of the statusbar. Very convenient API for customization. iOS 7 ready!

MIT licensed.

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MZCroppableView

MZCroppableView

MZCroppableView is a subclass of UIView that helps in irregular image cropping.

BSD licensed.

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MZLoading

MZLoading

A custom loading animation.

License unspecified.

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DRDynamicSlideShow

DRDynamicSlideShow

A UIScrollView subclass to easily implement an amazing swiping interactive slide show, as IFTTT's.

GIF image

License unspecified.

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BMTimeFormatter

BMTimeFormatter

provides a custom NSFormatter for values representing a time in seconds with precision 1milli second.

Format: [-]::. Examples: 03:04:17.183 -01:20:59.444

Used in a text field, a value can be inserted in the format of seconds or in the above colon format.

BSD licensed.

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TSCurrencyTextField

TSCurrencyTextField

UITextField subclass for ATM-style currency-amount entry.

MIT licensed.

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CTFeedback

CTFeedback

Get feedback from your iOS users.

MIT licensed.

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ExtensiveCell

ExtensiveCell

iOS TableViewCell component.

Selected cell drops a detail view down.

MIT licensed.

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DLAlertView

DLAlertView

UIAlertView replacement that can embed custom content views, is fully themable and let's you use a delegate and/or blocks.

BSD licensed.

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RDVCalendarView

RDVCalendarView

Highly customizable calendarView and calendarViewController for iOS

  • Supports iPad and iPhone
  • Supports landscape and portrait orientations
  • Fully localized using NSLocale
  • iOS 5.0+

MIT licensed.

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GRProKit

GRProKit

AppKit "replacement" to replicate the Pro App look

BSD licensed.

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Typhoon

Typhoon

A new dependency injection container for Objective-C. Light-weight, yet powerful, full-featured and super-easy to use.

  • Non-invasive. No macros or XML required - uses powerful Objective-C run-time.

  • No magic strings - hooks into your IDE support enabling refactoring and compile-time checking.

  • Dependencies declared in any order. (The order that makes sense to humans).

  • Allows both dependency injection (injection of classes defined in the DI context) as well as configuration management (values that get converted to the required type at runtime). Because this allows. . .

  • No fragmented qualifier macros, modules, etc. Makes it easy to have multiple configurations of the same base-class or protocol.

  • Application assembly - the wiring of dependencies and configuration management - is all encapsulated in a convenient document. At the same time this document can be grouped into chapters. Now you know where to look if you need to change something.

  • Supports both initializer and property injection. In the case of the latter, it has customizable call-backs to ensure that the class is in the required state before and after properties are set.

  • Lean. It has a very low footprint, so is appropriate for CPU and memory constrained devices.

Apache 2.0 licensed.

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SimpleDatePicker

SimpleDatePicker

A simple date picker with flat design.

MIT licensed.

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