After a long time of sitting inside, drinking coffee by the window and dreaming about the better times, we have finally had our first coffee break on the sunny balcony of our Osijek office. Hello sun, welcome back! And while we were in this dreamy, happy mood, we’ve prepared a new list with five iOS libraries, perfect for the springy month in front of us. Enjoy! :)
1. PanelKit
One of the reasons we love iPad so much is that it gives us the screen real estate as a notepad, but without the unnecessary complexity of a PC-style OS. But sometimes you’re making a complex app. And a complex apps need a complex UI. Maybe something with a UI paradigm we have been using for 30 years now: Windows.
PanelKit lets you quickly transition from a popover, to a window, to a master-detail view, with each transition being really fluid and easy to use. This is a really good compromise between giving users power and making your UI too complex.
2. Dotzu
Dotzu is a logging framework that’s unlike the other logging frameworks. It integrates into your app so you can see all of the things happening inside the actual app, not in your console.
This lets you browse the feed of your app and see outgoing requests to your backend in real time. There’s a cute little emoji rocket flying from the Dotzu button representing each request.
Tapping the button brings up all requests and responses and all print statements, presented in a nicely formatted table. No more CMD+F-ing inside the console in Xcode!
Just make sure you don’t forget to disable Dotzu when sending the app to your client. :)
3. AnimatedCollectionViewLayout
Collection views are really, really powerful. Unfortunately, they can sometimes be hard to write and use because of how complex they are. This is an extension to UICollectionView that lets you provide animations when scrolling between cells!
You can create custom Animator objects and assign them to the collection view, or use the seven cool built-in transitions.
4. Spots
It’s hard to provide an overview of Spots in a few sentences, but here goes: Spots is a UI framework that is an abstraction of UIKit. It builds UIViewController’s from a dictionary. This means you can have a JSON file that is the representation of your layout, and Spots will build it!
{
"components":[
{
"title":"Hyper iOS",
"type":"list",
"span":"1",
"items":[
{
"title":"John Hyperseed",
"subtitle":"Build server",
"image":"{image url}",
"type":"profile",
"action":"profile:1",
"meta":{
"nationality":"Apple"
}
},
}
]
}This feature leads to a lot of cool stuff: You can have your UI on the backend, without needing to push updates to change it. You can have live-reloading, no need to rebuild the project and navigate to the screen just to see a margin change.
You can read more about Spots and why it was built here:
5. SwiftPasscodeLock
This is a small UI component that lets you type in a password or use your fingerprint to unlock something in your app, much like when you’re unlocking the iPhone.
When you’re making an app you want to be secure, this is a must! The fact that it supports Touch ID and has a look that users are already used to, means it’s the easiest way for your users to securely enter your app.
Hope you liked our March favorites, and if you try them out, be sure to let us know how did it go. :) And while you are here, check out our Android libraries list or some other articles from our dev team. Have a nice month, everyone! :)
