Presentation from CocoaHeads Tricity meeting on 31.03.2015 about most popular Cocoa libraries and CocoaPods.

1. Do not reinvent
the wheel
Make use of Cocoa libraries
and ready components
Mateusz Klimczak

2. Agenda
! Overview of the most popular Cocoa
libraries and ready components
! When to use ready components?
! CocoaPods – an easy way to organise
your components
! Let’s create our own Pod
! Use Gemfile to control the CocoaPods
version
! Discussion

3. ! Probably the most popular iOS library
! Main features:
! Encapsulates the common patterns of
communicating with a web application over
HTPP: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.
! Easy request serialisation
! Since 2.0 version support for caching
downloaded images (both in-memory and disk
caching)
! Network reachability manager

4. ReactiveCocoa
! Objective-C framework inspired by
Functional Reactive Programming
! Provides APIs for composing and
transforming streams of values
! Instead of using mutable variables RAC
provides signals that capture present and
future values
! Widely discussed on last meeting

5. RAC – usage example

6. ! Amazing tool for crash reporting with
support for both iOS and Android
! Provides detailed statistics about crashes
! Recently integrated into Twitter’s Fabric.IO
– mobile platform for mobile analytics,
app distribution and reporting
! Allows integration with Trello&BitBucket
! Live example!

7. CocoaLumberjack
! Logging framework for Mac and iOS
! Faster than NSLog
! Main features:
! Send logs over the network
! Use multiple loggers to log simultaneously to
many places (file, console, database)
! Define different log levels per logger
(e.g. log verbose to console, but briefly to
log server)

8. MagicalRecord
! Inspired by RoR Active Record Fetching
! Active Record is an approach to accessing
data in database
! Database table is wrapped into a class
! Object instance is tied to a single row in the
database table
! The wrapper class implements properties for
each column in the table
! Allows clear, simple, one-line fetches from
CoreData

9. FXKeychain
! Lightweight wrapper around the Apple
keychain API
! Exposes the commonly used functionality
while hiding complexity of underlying APIs

10. RHAddressBook
! Library for interfacing with the iOS
AddressBook
! All contact attributes on various objects
(Person, Group) are exposed as properties
– no more dealing with CF methods

11. TPKeyboardAvoiding
! Universal solution for moving text fields out
of the keyboard in iOS
! Uses UIScrollView/UITableView subclasses
that handles everything for you

12. PaymentKit
! Library providing utility methods for dealing
with credit card payments:
! Credit card number validation&formatting
! Expiration validation
! Credit card type checking
! Credit card providers icons fetching
! Ready to use UI components for to input
card data

13. card.io
! Provides ready to use
credit card scanning

14. XMLDictionary
! Library for parsing and generating XMLs
! Allows parsing XML received from server to
NSDictionary and vice versa

15. TSMessages
! Provides an easy to use class to show little
notification views on the top of the screen

16. MSDynamicsDrawerViewController
! Container view controller
that manages the
presentation of a single
view controller overlaid
over drawer view
controllers
! Supports swipe to open
and close the drawer

17. MBProgressHUD
! Customisable, easy to use progress HUD
with an indicator while work is being done
in background thread

18. JSQMessagesViewController
! Messages UI library for iOS
! Allows displaying media, map location and more

19. And many, many more…
! Kiwi
! Specta
! Masonry
! PureLayout
! GPUImage
! JSONKit
! Facebook/Twitter/Google
! …

20. When to use ready
components?
! We want to save some time (it’s not
always worth it – to be continued)
! Library/component is still developed and
preferably have more than 1 contributor
! We don’t need a full control of the code
! We don’t need to provide a high-level
security
! If it is a UI component, we don’t have to
create highly customised interface

21. ! Dependency manager for Swift and
Objective-C project
! According to the http://rubygems.org
currently there are over 1.1 million downloads
of CocoaPods (it doesn’t mean that there are
that many users)
! http://cocoapods.org sites are generating
180k visits per month
! You can try the demo project of the Pod
without integrating it into your project

22. ! It’s easy to get started
! Installation:
! gem install cocoapods
! Create Podfile
! pod init
! Add pods references to your Podfile
! Run command:
! pod install
! Use .xcworkspace instead of .xcodeproj

23. ! Life example – let’s create our own Pod!
! Instructions:
http://guides.cocoapods.org/making/
making-a-cocoapod.html

24. Gemfile
! Use Gemfile to keep the same version of
CocoaPods for everyone in team
! Gemfile should specify the required version
of CocoaPods
! Install pods using:
! bundle exec pod install

25. Discussion!
! What libraries do you most often use?
! When do you prefer to write your own
code?
! Your experiences!