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iOS Libraries

appdevmag.com

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61–70 of 78 posts

Re: iOS Libraries

#61

Post by allenbrunson »

halostatue wrote: post #52
allenbrunson wrote: post #41

i tried MBProgressHUD. it is way too heavy. so i wrote my own, smaller one: http://www.platinumball.net/blog/2010/02/27/uiprogresshud-re...

I'm not sure what you found heavy about it; it's feature-full, yes. (I'm a bit familiar with the code because I used it in a project of my own and have my own fork of it at GitHub.)

well, for one thing, one of its modes is to launch a background thread to perform a user-specified operation while it is being displayed. not something a control should be doing.

Re: iOS Libraries

#63

Post by donkuan »

varikin wrote: post #30
Maakuth wrote: post #22

I've never tried iOS development, and I'm a bit surprised by many of these library recommendations. For example HTTP requests, regular expressions and progress indicators strike me as something your platform definitely should provide you with. Of course it's great that there are quality libraries to fill in where the platform falls short.

These libraries exist because iOS (IMHO) is too low level in places, such as HTTP requests. There is an interface you have to implement in order to make HTTP requests, and you have to handle all the data (bytes) that come in incrementally. It is very handy to have a library that handles the connection, caching, redirects, errors, etc.

The NSURLConnection class is actually pretty high level and does in fact handle things like caching, redirects, errors, etc. for you. I have been using ASIHttpRequest for a while -- it's not bad but can feel quite heavy at times. For future projects, I may roll my own HTTP lib by wrapping NSURLConnection directly. Btw, GCD and blocks in iOS 4 make it super easy to structure your network calls the same way you would in JavaScript with xmlhttprequest and closures, which makes async code much cleaner and easier to write.

Re: iOS Libraries

#64

Post by nanijoe »

oscardelben wrote: post #11

A few days ago I released the DateCalculations library which was inspired by Ruby on Rails calculation library. I'll leave it here just in case: https://github.com/oscardelben/DateCalculations

How timely..thanks!!

Re: iOS Libraries

#65

Post by donkuan »

edge17 wrote: post #60

Is there a good way to authenticate youtube? The GData stuff I've found was janky at best. It worked on a newly created account, but didn't work on my age old pre-acquisition account

That's not really a GData issue. I think GData ClientLogin no longer works for YouTube accounts that are not linked to a Google account. AuthSub or OAuth should still work though.

Re: iOS Libraries

#66

Post by donkuan »

gpambrozio wrote: post #26
jashmenn wrote: post #15

ShareKit http://www.getsharekit.com/ is also an awesome library for sharing content on social sites.

I was just going to mention it. I think it's way better than the facebook library mentioned in the article. I'm using for my upcoming app and it was a snap to use it for facebook and twitter

I played with ShareKit for a while and it does include an impressive range of sharing options (and really helped me understand how OAuth works). However I found that the sharing functionality seemed to be tied to a specific visual presentation, which I didn't like. In the end, I decided not to use it because it didn't match the look and feel I wanted for my app.

Re: iOS Libraries

#67

Post by kelnos »

uptown wrote: post #5

No clue what happened to the original, but here's a post which lists what they had on their list: http://sordyl.info/2011/03/15/10-ios-libraries-to-make-your-... MBProgressHUD – Progress Indicator Library ASIHttpRequest – HTTP Network Library JSON Framework – JSON Support Flurry – Detailed Usage Statistics RegexKitLite – Regular Expression Support Facebook iOS SDK – Facebook API Library SDWebImage – Simple Web Image…

I've had some trouble with ASIHTTPRequest. It times out sending POST requests (with decent sized payloads) sending to our Rails server, upwards of 98% of the time. (I've literally only gotten one request to return properly.) Because I'm a masochist, I wrote a minimal replacement using the CFSocket API, and it works fine, every time.

My fear/guess is that something that ASIHTTPRequest is using is assuming that it can bombard the socket with data even when the output buffer gets full. At least that's the initial problem I had when I was writing my replacement, and after staring at ASIHTTPRequest for days, I can't think of anything else.

Re: iOS Libraries

#68

Post by Zev »

hiroprot wrote: post #7

JSONKit ( https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit ) is quite a bit faster than the mentioned json-framework. Also, an alternative to SDWebImage is EGOImageLoading ( https://github.com/enormego/EGOImageLoading ), which might or might not be better (Instagram uses it). We've been using both libraries quite happily for our new startup, forkly.

JSONKit is less stable than yajl/touchjson/json-framework is. I was seeing 2-3 crashes/day in it when I last tried using it[1], switched back to yawl and haven't had any crashes in json parsing since.

1. About three weeks ago.

Re: iOS Libraries

#69

Post by stephth »

nika wrote: post #35

Not just a library, and something that really makes development for iOS easier is Unity. http://unity3d.com It may not be free, but it is well worth the money. I use it for non-game apps because development is so rapid.

Interesting! Could you share urls to the non-games you made using unity?

Re: iOS Libraries

#70

Post by stephth »

donkuan wrote: post #66
gpambrozio wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just going to mention it. I think it's way better than the facebook library mentioned in the article. I'm using for my upcoming app and it was a snap to use it for facebook and twitter

I played with ShareKit for a while and it does include an impressive range of sharing options (and really helped me understand how OAuth works). However I found that the sharing functionality seemed to be tied to a specific visual presentation, which I didn't like. In the end, I decided not to use it because it didn't match the look and feel I wanted for my app.

Have you had trouble changing the UI? I haven't tried ShareKit but the website highlights "Customizable UI" as one of the main features.
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