Why do things twice (3rd party libraries in iOS)

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Anybody developing iPhone Apps probably using 3rd party libraries. Time is limited and why go for something, that was already completed by others in a perfect way and credit them for their hard work. Me personally I tend to take a good look around before I go and try to recreate something which is already there.

Just briefly I want to mention some of the 3rd party libraries for app development I use in my projects and credit the developers for creating these useful tools:

  • Start off by mentioning EGORefreshTableViewPullRefresh – you want to use some ‘pull-to-reload’ mechanism start by using EGOTableViewPullRefresh
  • You use tableviews and cells use an image to display. Here’s a smart and handy library to load  and cache images from the web. The lib extends the UIImageView with useful categories to add methods to set UIImages to views after downloading their data from the web. I know AFNetwork includes this feature as well but you may want to take a look to this alternative SDWebImage
  • Probably the most used libs for networking is block-based AFNetwork. To be honest I just start out with it as I was using Apple’s native NSURLConnection and its delegation so far but I started to rethink my choice as people often point to that lib when it comes to handle network tasks. It should be especially useful when tracking upload progress and JSON parsing which happens in almost every application intensively.
  • A very clean and easy to use progress HUD for your application. I never run into any kind of trouble with that one. I know there are a lot out there but you want to checkout SVProgressHUD for sure.
  • You are looking for a extended use of UIKit and things you couldn’t reproduce. With this framework I managed to create a native calender like look and feel in one of my application. tapkulibrary is big time!
  • Looking for a nice way to earn user feedback and app ratings? There are a lot of ways to handle user feedback but what’s better for your application than getting a good review in the App Store. You want to create a UIAlertView like popup asking the user for feedback after either a ‘significant event’ or a fixed period of time? The appirator is really worth taking a look!
  • Last but not least I want to present you more a tool than a lib/framework which I find really interesting and useful. Crashlytics help you to track crashes users experience with your app and sends you the current crash log as well as the device configuration adn several other useful things of that user. It has also a very nice website and UI concept and even an integrated Mac app. Well, though I like this tool very much I really hope not to hear too much of it ;-)

I use this things listed above quite frequently. What’s your favorite tools? Where and for what are you using it?

UPDATE

See this related post for a great article on Top 10 iOS libraries at Ray Wenderlich‘s bog.