Year 1 Issue 17

Hello there! I hope you had a good week, and that you verified your version of Xcode. Fun fact, I considered adding the XcodeGhost source to last week’s list of projects, but decided against it.

Big news: The iOS Times finally has its own Twitter handle: @_theiostimes 🎉 Go there and hit follow 😉

Heaps of interesting projects this week, for those keen on UI, those looking for design patterns examples, and every one else in the in between. Let’s get started!

Neon

A framework to programmatically the arrangement and sizing of UI views, particularly useful when building layouts with relative sizing and positioning.

I like the author’s idea that: “_ We’re not robots, so why should we build our UIs like we are?_”, but I’m not sure if using frame math rather than AutoLayout under the hood is a good idea.

Run

A Swift Wrapper for Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) supporting method chaining.

Run.background { () -> Void in
  for index in 1...UInt64.max{
      print(index)
  {
}.main { () -> Void in
  print("Back to main thread")
}

CoreDataStack

The Big Nerd Ranch CoreData stack, updated to Swift 2. More info on the stack design and how to use it can be found here.

A word of advice as a former MagicalRecord user. Using these stack is useful to get started quickly, but nothing will replace the understanding of a framework a developer gets when using it himself.

HackingWithSwift

A collection of project examples from the hackingwithswift.com book. A big thank you to the author Paul Hudson which decided to open source the code and release all the rest of the content for free once he had earned enough to cover the costs. What a good example of giving back to the community!

BlockParty

An open source implementation of content blocking app. There has been a lot of buzz around these apps and the implication on the market recently, this and this are good reads on the topic.

If you want to compare implementations have a look at this “troll” implementation by schwa.

STPopup

A library to use a UINavigationController like controller inside a popup.

RACMarbles

A Playground showcasing ReactiveCocoa’s features using streams of moving marbles.

EXTView

A collection of UIKit views subclasses with enhanced Interface Builder configuration options thanks to IBInspectable and IBDesignable.

Blurable

Simple library that adds blur() and unBlur() methods to UIView, which applies/removes a Core Image Gaussian blur filter to the contents. It is implemented using Swift 2’s protocol extension.

zulip-ios

Zulip is an open source group chat, born as a Dropbox Hack Week project, with a set of useful feature for code discussion, and this is their open source iOS client. As you know I am a big fan of looking at other people app’s code, so I could not not feature this project.

An speaking of open source apps, they team at Artsy just started working on a new open source app with code name Emergence. There is not a lot to look there yet, but knowing the quality of the code they produce is worth bookmarking 😉.

Other Interesting Projects

• SCTableViewCell cell with swipe to delete effect like iOS Mail app.
• PSOperation a Swift 2 version of the sample code provided in the Advanced NSOperation session of WWDC 2015, with improvements and fixes.
• ZSeatSelector tool to generate seat map layouts, just in case you’ll need to build a iOS client for a plane company.

Still Hot From Last Weeks 🔥

• Nuke frameworks for loading, caching, processing, and displaying images.
• Watchdog a class for logging excessive blocking on the main thread.
• iOS9-Adapation-Tips collection of snippets and explanation on how to support iOS 9 on existing codebases.
• Chameleon feature packed colors framework for iOS, with very nice defaults.

This week’s issue had a major difference from the others, can you spot it? Tweet it at @_theiostimes, or reply to this email.