Year 2 Issue 3

Hello all, how has your week been? I hope you are fresh and recharged.

Before we begin I’d like to apologise. It has been brought to my attention that I often use the word guys when referring to the team of an agency. This is not fair for all the women that might be part of that team.

I’d like to apologize for my misuse of the English language, and promise that I will put more attention in the words I’ll type. In particular I’d like to apologize to any thoughtbot developer that might have been offended or felt left out by my last issue, and thank Natasha for bringing the topic up.

It can be hard to infer the intention of the writer of a text when reading it, specially when the writer is not very skilled, but please believe me when I say that I am very sad to have been giving the wrong impression, and that I have never intended any discrimination.

I am glad someone reach out to me to highlight this, which will help me publishing a better The iOS Time. As always if you have any comment, concern or complaint you can reach me on Twitter @mokagio or simply hit reply to this email.

And now let’s jump straight into this week’s most interesting projects.

IBAnimatable

IBAnimatable by Jake Lin makes possible to configure views and their animations from Interface Builder. Be sure to checkout this framework because it could become your best friend when prototyping animations. On top of the IB integration it is also compatible with Playgrounds, so you can experiment with your animations settings without having to launch an app.

CoreDragon

A powerful drag-n-drop framework of iOS by Nevyn Bengtsson.

Chameleon-Swift

This experimental project by the iconfactory to port iOS applications to OS X with minimum work.

BitBar

This open source app by Mat Ryer allows you to put the output of any script of program into the OS X Menu Bar. Your imagination is the limit. Some examples:

• Current Spotify song
• Current xcodebuild version
• tail
• Available brew updates
• Much more…

StatefulViewController

This library by Alexander Schuch defines a protocol that UIViewController subclasses can conform to and gain the simple APIs manage presenting views depending on the view controller state.

The use case Alexander is covering is the one of a view controller loading data from the network. As we all know what could seem like a simple decision tree actually becomes non trivial to handle when you want to cover all possible states. But thanks to StatefulViewController most of the leg work related with this is taken care for us. And if the [default state machine] used by the library doesn’t cover your use case you can easily roll out your own.

SwiftyGPIO

Umberto Raimondi brings us this library to interact with Linux GPIO (general purpose input/output) on a number of boards such as RaspberryPi, BeagleBone Black, UDOO, Tegra, CHIP, etc.

The “IoT” world is super interesting and having the ability to experiment with hardware devices using Swift is very fascinating.

Bluetonium

This Swift library by the e-sites team is a CoreBluetooth wrapper that simplifies communication with Bluetooth devices.

ImagePicker

The Hyper brings us another great iOS library. ImagePicker is a all-in-one read to use camera and image picking library with a polished UI that would fit and enhance most apps.

TransitionTreasury

TransitionTreasury by “DianQK aka @Songxut” provides a set of APIs to simplify writing custom animate transitions for view controllers. It can help you with custom and interactive transition animations, status bar and tab bar style during animation an much more.

There is also a transitiontreasury.com website with a catalog of animated transitions from famous apps, like OmniFocus, Elevate, Twitter, etc., reimplemented using TransitionTreasury and ready to use.

CocoaPods-app

This week the CocoaPods team released a new beta for their OS X client app. CocoaPods itself is not far from releasing the long awaited 1.0.0.

Other Interesting Projects

• Monoid Monoid implementation in Swift, with some limitations that might be resolved when Swift 3 comes out.
• STLBGVideo Display a video as your view controller’s background as easily as filling a .plist
• PeachKit Swift Wrapper for the Peach.cool APIs
• PeachMac An OS X client app for Peach.cool, using PeachKit.
• SwiftgDB SQLite Swift ORM