Year 2 Issue 7

EPShapes

This library allows you to render shapes such as polygons, stars, hearts, and arrows with n sides, both programmatically and in Interface Builder by implementing IBDesignable and IBInspectable.

XLPagerTabStrip

The Xmartlabs team is back on GitHub with a port to iOS of Android’s PagerTabStrip. This library is straightforward to use, and has plenty of visual customizations, along with 4 different stock styles for you to choose from.

Hammerspoon

Hammerspoon is a window manager and desktop automator app that allows you to define keyboard shortcuts performing any sort of action by scripting them in Lua. You can resize windows, move them around the screen, load a number of apps in given positions at the same time, interact with the UI of an app, and much more, have a look at this comprehensive getting started guide.

As a side note, I’ve been using Mjonir, on which Hammerspoon is base, for a long time, and really encourage to take a couple of hours to automate the management of your windows, it will save you a lot of time in the long run.

URLNavigator

URLNavigator provides a nice API to navigate through view controllers by URLs. The first use case that comes to mind is to handle app launches from custom URLs, but you can use URLs to navigate between controllers from within your application as well.

Navigator.map("myapp://home", HomeViewController.self)
Navigator.map("myapp://post/<id>", PostViewController.self)

Navigator.map("myapp://alert") { URL, values in
    print(URL.parameters["title"])
    print(URL.parameters["message"])
    return true
}

AlamofireNetworkActivityIndicator

This library lets you manage the visibility of the network activity indicator on iOS automagically with a single line of code. The activity indicator will be shown and hidden automatically when requests made through Alamofire will start and finish.

Reel Search

This library refreshes something as usual as picking a value from a list by dressing it with an original and pleasant UI.

trySwiftApp

The try! Swift conference will start in two weeks, but you don’t have to wait for the its app, it is already available on GitHub.

CRParticleEffect

This library simplifies the creation of particle effects into a handful of lines of code.

Element

If you really cannot stand Interface Builder, or only know CSS and want to start designing OS X applications, then you’ll find this library very interesting. Element is a UI framework for OS X applications that aims to empower developers to draw UIs in an alternative way.

A great amount of went into this project with dozens of UI components already supported, and custom built SVG engine, css engine, and vector draw engine.

Stevia

Speaking of UI frameworks, Stevia is a UI layout library for iOS that aims to provide a simpler API than Auto Layout. It also provide an ingenious take on the visual layout language made up of custom operators (whether that’s a good idea it is another question 😳):

layout([
	100,
	|-email-| ~ 80,
	8,
	|-password-| ~ 80,
	"",
	|login| ~ 80,
	0
])