Weekly Roundup: "Programming Sucks"

Aaron Brethorst, May 03, 2014

Last week, an article entitled Programming Sucks made the rounds in my circles. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend dropping everything and spending the next 15 minutes reading it. Although it adopts a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, hyperbolic attitude towards the failings of our craft, there is enough truth in passages like the following to make me simultaneously laugh, cry, and die a little inside:

You immerse yourself in a world of total meaninglessness where all that matters is a little series of numbers went into a giant labyrinth of symbols and a different series of numbers or a picture of a kitten came out the other end.

To be clear, this isn't to say that software development is meaningless or pointless. Far from it, in fact! Software development it is literally vital to modern society, and that is exactly why pulling back from it at times in order to gain perspective on what it really means and how it affects the world around us is so important.

Maintaining perspective will make you a better software developer, and that is why I will now bid you adieu for this week to go develop a roll of film and make prints in a darkroom.

Best,
Aaron


What We're Reading


Control of the Week

STXDynamicTableView

STXDynamicTableView

An Instagram-inspired table view to display a photo stream. STXDynamicTableView is designed to solve the common use case to display a feed of photos with their corresponding likes, caption, and comments.

http://engineering.2359media.net/blog/2014/04/16/rebuilding-instagram-feed-table-view/

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites  See a Video


Weekly Roundup

RGBColorSlider

RGBColorSlider

A simple way to add dynamic RGB color sliders to an iOS application. When the value of one slider changes, the background colors of the others change accordingly. For a full description, check out the README on github.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


AHKActionSheet

AHKActionSheet

A UIActionSheet alternative with a block-based API and a customizable look. Heavily inspired by the Spotify app. Optimized for the iPhone.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


M13ContextMenu

M13ContextMenu

M13ContextMenu is a Pinterest style context menu for iOS. Designed to work with UICollectionViews, it is easily added to any UICollectionView to add a context menu for each cell. It can also be added to any other UIView. The items are customizable, so it is very easy to style the context menu for your application.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


TWRBorderedView

TWRBorderedView

A custom UIView subclass to easily turn on drawing of each single border on a view.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


GraphKit

GraphKit

A lightweight library of animated charts for iOS.

Super easy to customize individual bar/line color, animation durations and more.

Demo: pod try GraphKit

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


CADRACSwippeableCell

CADRACSwippeableCell

Swippeable UICollectionViewCell subclass made with Reactive Cocoa.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


RTFacebookAlbum

RTFacebookAlbum

Easy to use library to get album and photos from a user's Facebook account.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


AppearanceMaker

AppearanceMaker

Create custom appearances to customize your app's look with NSAppearance

BSD licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


DKScrollingTabController

DKScrollingTabController

Scrolling tab control for iOS.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites  See a Video


RPBorderlessSegmentedControl

RPBorderlessSegmentedControl

A replica of Xcode 5's toolbar segmented controls.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


RBImagePickerController

RBImagePickerController

This controller can be used to pick one or more images from the photo library.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


NSString+Color

NSString+Color

Category on NSString allowing simple color instantiation from its content. Support web colors and custom colors code also.

Examples : [@"red" representedColor]; [@"redColor" representedColor]; [@"FFee45" representedColor]; [@"roSyBroWn" representedColor];

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


iTunesPicker

iTunesPicker

Discover, search and compare rankings for apps, books, movies and music from iTunes in any available country.

iTunes charts are available only for your country, with iTunesPicker you can discover apps (and others items) in the world rankings and compare the position (top 200 is the iTunes API limit) for an app (book,movie,music) in the world rankings.

You can include iTunesPicker in your app to encourage the download of your others apps (without breaking the approval rule 2.25), you can show your others apps in the App Store with a few lines of code.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


THPinViewController

THPinViewController

iOS 7 style PIN screen for iPhone and iPad that can be displayed modally whenever the user needs to authenticate, e.g. when accessing a specially protected part of your app.

Features
  • Has iPhone portrait and iPad portrait and landscape layouts
  • Supports variable PIN lengths
  • Buttons can show numbers and letters or only numbers
  • Background and tint colors as well as text and color of the prompt can be customized

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


DIDatepicker

DIDatepicker

Yet another datepicker for iOS.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


UICollectionViewLeftAlignedLayout

UICollectionViewLeftAlignedLayout

A layout for UICollectionView that aligns the cells to the left

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


OMAMovingAnnotations

OMAMovingAnnotations

Moving annotations for iOS MapView

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


Metronome

Metronome

A metronome application that does the job. It uses a given Beats Per Minute (BPM) and Beats Per Circle (BPC) to generate tick and tock sounds.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


Panorama

Panorama

implementation of the photo tilt gesture/UX found in Facebook's Paper app.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


UICollectionViewRightAlignedLayout

UICollectionViewRightAlignedLayout

A layout for UICollectionView that aligns the cells to the right.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


UITableView-Wave

UITableView-Wave

animation uitableview reload with wave

Custom licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


GBFlatButton

GBFlatButton

A flat and light implementation of UIButton for iOS

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


CPKenburnsSlideshowView

CPKenburnsSlideshowView

Inspired by Hey Day.

pod 'CPKenburnsSlideshowView', '~> 1.0'

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


AFWeather

AFWeather

Getting the weather forecast never has been so easy

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


Pie Chart

Pie Chart

Simeple pie chart on Mac OS X

License unspecified.

Find out more Add to Favorites


AZNotification

AZNotification

AZNotification is a custom control which allows the user to provide user interface notifications to the user. AZNotification is implemented for iOS 7 framework and utilizes the UIKit Dynamics to create the physics effects.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


Secret Viewer

Secret Viewer

A quick recreation of the Secret Viewer from the Secret app with dynamic blur, parallax and expanding images during scroll.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


FFCalendar

FFCalendar

Yearly, Monthly, Weekly and Daily Calendars for iOS.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


AMSmoothAlert

AMSmoothAlert

Pretty cool AlertView animation.

I made it easy to use : 2 methods + 1 customization method at the moment.

Feel free to ask for some new stuff (animations, icons or whatever) !

I hope it will be useful or inspirational for somebody :)

Antoine

Apache 2.0 licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


MONActivityIndicatorView

MONActivityIndicatorView

An awesome custom activity indicator view for iOS.

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


ChartView

ChartView

DChartView is a customized line chart for any representation, it's built with CoreGraphics so no need to worry about load on you application.

GPL licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


FrameExtractor

FrameExtractor

This demo application extracts frames from videos.

GPL licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites


eLBeeIsolator

eLBeeIsolator

Isolate a UITableViewCell. This example uses a longpress, but you can use whatever you want. There are additional libraries included with this code including:

MIT licensed.

Find out more Add to Favorites