Year 1 Issue 26

Announcement: The iOS Times Advent Calendar 🎅

To celebrate this year’s Christmas I’ve prepared a series of 24 bite sized tutorials on some of the most useful open source libraries for iOS and OS X development, organised in an advent calendar fashion, one per day, starting December 1st of course.

If you wish to receive a daily email with the most recent tutorial subscribe here or reply xmas to this email.

And now let’s dive into this week’s most interesting projects 😎

Chatto

A Swift lightweight framework to build chat applications, by the folks at Badoo. The architecture seems clean and with good separation of concerns, and among the many features there is support for pagination in both directions, and extensibility for the input component.

PreciseCoverage

Xcode plugin to get more data out of the Code Coverage interface. It shows precise coverage percentage, and color codes the progress bar, red for low coverage, yellow for medium, and green for good. I really appreciate these little plugins and libraries that do only one thing, but a very useful one indeed.

LLDB-Is-It-Not

Eloy Durán, CocoaPods’ dad, comes with a new Xcode plugin to load project specific .lldbinit. This can be very handy to share LLDB commands specific to your project with the rest of the team, and/or avoid cluttering your main .lldbinit.

You-Can-Do-It

Orta, another member of the CocoaPods core team, and pillar of the iOS and OS X open source community has recently been talking about the importance of being nice. This Xcode plugin is a great gift for anyone who is starting to learn Objective-C or Swift. Every 3 failed builds you will be prompted with an inspirational Shia LaBeouf short video.

Format

This library is a collection of formatters for Swift types, that wrap around classes like NSNumberFormatter to provide a more friendly API.

let formattedNumber = 45.format(Decimals.Two) // 45.00

At the moment it provides formatters for numbers, currencies, addresses, and colors.

SwiftFoundation

This project, part of the PureSwift organisation, aims to provide a standard library for Swift with no import Foundation, making it really cross-platform and Linux ready. Apple has promised to release Swift by the end of 2015, will hopefully be able to leverage SwiftFoundation soon.

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Perfect

Perfect is a framework for writing server side applications in Swift. The aim of the project is to “enables you to use one language for both front and back ends”. I personally don’t find anything wrong in having to use one language for the server and one for the client, but it is undeniable that having no language context switch increases productivity.

AutocompleteField

UITextField subclass that adds live word completion.

Former

This library provides Swift APIs to build UITableView based forms. All the most common form inputs are covered, and more are to come.

netfox

A one line setup, in-app network debugging library. Shake your device to show a view of all the request initiated by your app, each selectable to see all its related data. I would normally recommend not using in-app debugging tools, as it is easy to forget them there and have them leak in release builds. But if you find yourself in situations where you need to debug on the go, this is a very valuable option.

Other Interesting Projects

• TagCellLayout Tag layout for UICollectionView supporting left, center, and right alignments.
• LxTabBadgePoint Easily custom UIViewController’s tabBar badge view.
• cleartext-mac A text editor allowing only the top 1000 most common words in English.
• LLSlideMenu Side menu that slides in with a spring.

You might have noticed that this issue doesn’t have any image in it. What do you think of this approach? I’d like to hear from you, reply to this email or hit me up on Twitter @mokagio.