Must-have iOS Libraries

During the years a lot of interesting iOS projects have been popping up on Github. Below you can find the projects that you must know if you are an iOS Developer.

Nimbus

Nimbus is a complete re-write of the well-known Three20 library that contains a lot of features that you will eventually need as a iOS Developer. The library is light-weight, so you don’t need to include all classes if you don’t need them. There is a small core set, and a lot of separate components. The library is extremely well documented so it’s a joy to use.

• WebController: In case you need to open a url in your all like Twitter or Facebook does. Comes feature complete as an in app mini browser.
• NetworkImageView: Pretty useful component that handles all the hassle of downloading and caching of images in your app. There are a lot of these components out there, but this one has some nifty features for optimizing.
• AttributedLabel: A UILabel that utilizes NSAttributedString to format its text. So you can easily add some styling anf formatting to your Label.
• PhotoAlbumScrollView:

Be sure to checkout this amazing upcoming feature called Chameleon where you can style your UI components on the fly with CSS without rebuilding the app.

iOS BoilerPlate

If you need something to get started quickly then the iOSBoilerplate project is a good start. It is based on the HTML5 Boilerplate Template. It is intended to provide a base of code to start with, not intended to be a framework. It is intended to be modified and extended by the developer to fit their needs and it includes solid third-party libraries if needed to not reinvent the wheel.

It contains some Base controllers that are already enabled to call an external API, and the ListViewController has buil-in support for the “Pull-To-Refresh” feature that is omnipresent in iOS apps. It provides an app with examples for every feature in the template so you should get the hang of it pretty fast.

Tapku

Tapku Library is an open source iOS framework built for iPhone & iPad. The framework includes popular API’s including Coverflow, Calendar Grid and Chart View. The framework also has tidbits of code that will make iPhone and iPad development all the more enjoyable and faster. Integrating the framework is easy and can be incorporated right into your applications now. There is also a nice demo app to showcase some of the things you can take advantage of in the framework.

KKGridView

If you need a performant GridView then KKGridView is a very promising project. It works very similar like the UITableView does, so you’ll get the hang of it fast. But you will need to turn ARC on for this project, so that makes it a bit of a challenge to use. But it looks as a promising project and hopefully it will become the best GridView out there.