What really super useful third party frameworks / toolkits / projects are out there that people have used and have found to be a huge help in building their iPhone apps? Bonus points if you include a story about how it helped you on a real world project.
I'll go first:
cocos2d
JSON.framework
AQToolkit
EDIT: turned this community wiki
I would add the following for social networking support:
Twitter API: MGTwitterEngine
Facebook Connect
Three20
ASIHTTPRequest
Objective Resource lets you connect an iPhone app to a rails app.
While some of the frameworks listed are Mac-only, the question "What open source Cocoa/Cocoa Touch Frameworks are out there?" has links to many quality third-party frameworks in the answers. Of those, I've used Core Plot within our robotic control software to simplify the addition of scatter plots (of course, I'm a little biased, being one of the contributors to the project).
Related
I heard about cocoa studio from a friend of mine so i was curious to find out its details.....According to him issues of memory handling are decreased by its use..Now first of all i don't know what is it. Is it a 3rd Party SDK of framework? I tried to google around for information but currently their site is under maintenance and i was not able to gather any substantial information from other resources.
So can anybody enlighten me about its details.Any links suggestions,information would be appreciated...
Thanks
Aditya
Cocoa Studio is not a tool, Its name of the training course by "The Pragmatic Studio",The course is aimed at developers planning on building GUI applications on the Mac or the iPhone.
For More Information, have a look at: -
cocoa_studio
The Pragmatic Studio
Probably you are talking about cocos2d. It is a graphics library for iPhone and some other platforms.
http://cocos2d.org/
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/
Please put the great sites for learning objective c, essential things to iphone apps, UI codings like this with examples and codings....
Thanks....
I would recommend downloading the Stanford University videos using iTunesU in iTunes. Very informative and the course data and downloads are still available on Stanford's website.
The course page is here http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/
The videos are free in iTunes.
Apple's iOS Dev Center may be the most useful online all-in-one resource that you can find.
They provide coding how-to's, getting started videos, sample code, and other such general resources, combined with all of the technical knowledge (SDKs, reference libraries, etc.) that you'll eventually need.
In the very beginning I used resources from the Stanford University videos and then read some of the official iOS guides and references. Then I started working on an app project and tailored my learning around that. It's very difficult to learn all of iOS programming in one go without working on a project because the API is a lot to digest.
Once you've learned some of the iOS programming lingo, I would go ahead and use stackoverflow and the official developer forums to search for specific examples and solutions to the problem you are having while building your app.
Learn by doing!
Video tutorials are a good way to learn objective C. But i would suggest that at a initial stage it can help you but when you go deeper inside into programming want to play with objective C you should opt some time to look into the Apples Documentation. Apple's Documentation provides everything .
Dont miss thier Sample Code also.
A client do not want to consider MonoTouch for a new project.
MonoTouch.info has a long list of apps, but I have not found any on the caliber that can convince a client too choose a technology. The client has seen the list, and actually use the bland screenshots as an argument against MonoTouch.
Where can I find examples of applications useful as motivation. High profile apps created using MonoTouch, the apps you call home about. The apps that made it to the top 25 lists in their category.?
I responded on Twitter but thought I'd reply properly here;
The first app I will mention is iCircuit - http://icircuitapp.com/ - this application is featured on the Apple website here - http://www.apple.com/ipad/business/apps/index.html#workflow-icircuit - and is a pretty good seller.
Diggify is a Digg application which hit the top #8 sold application in Canada apparently - http://www.intomobile.com/apps/diggify/359756952/
An application that I built myself (it's a little old now admittedly) but I do think that it looks rather nice - http://bit.ly/gfxmasappstore :)
London Bike App is another nice looking application - http://www.londonbikeapp.com/
Update: Wow, this is an old question, there's a whole bunch of great apps using MonoTouch at http://xamarin.com/apps
Hope this helps,
ChrisNTR
I know of a couple apps that were built using Monotouch and sold very well but due to the uncertainly surrounding the terms when MT first came out and later the 3.3.1 mess the devs didn't make a big fuss out of it. I suspect they aren't the only ones not publicizing what technology they used to make their app.
If your client is using a handful of screenshots on a website as the reason to rule out using Monotouch then you might want to rethink your pitch. Whether or not an app has been developed in native Objective-C or C# via Monotouch makes no difference on the overall design or appearance because both rely on the CocoaTouch framework for UI. Being able to deliver an app that meets your client's idea of what makes a great app has nothing to do with the language you use and has everything to do with your ability to translate the essence of their ideas into a solid design and UX. Sell that, not the framework.
I found this article to be helpful when I'm trying to explain to others why I use Monotouch over native objective-c.
"Why we chose MonoTouch to write the Diggify iPhone app"
Can someone recommend a good Mobile UI Javascript/jQuery framework that works well with both the iPhone and Blackberry? I'm developing the core app from ASP.NET.
Thank you in advance.
I don't have any personal experience with any of these, but I thought I'd mention a few that I've heard of. It will probably depend more on the features you require for your specific application, to determine which framework suits you best. Also, this is by no means an exhaustive list - the "cross-platform" mobile frameworks seem to be popping up all over the place recently!
Rhodoes
PhoneGap
ramp
appcelerator
As it is today, the BlackBerry browser is not very friendly to these libraries. But the upcoming version will support HTML 5, which will allow you to use most popular js frameworks. From personal experience I can recommend Sencha and jQuery.
I would recommend Sencha Touch or Sproutcore.
Sencha Touch is very similar to EXTJS, which a lot of front end developers really like. Check out
http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/
It is probably more mature than SC, and you will have a larger developer base on which to draw. You are gonna wanna try out the demos on that link, on a phone or ipad if you have one.
However, I personally like the strong MVC pattern that Sproutcore enforces. The mobile framework exists, but I don't know of any major clients adopting it, yet. The founder of SC, Charles Jolley, recently left Apple to push his framework; its gonna be big.
BlackBerry has very basic browser.
But for iPhone, you can try jQTouch. Its lightweight and amazing.
I'm doing iPhone programming after 10+ years as a Java developer.
In the Java world, I'm accustomed to using 3rd party libraries for just about everything, from entire frameworks like Spring to small things like the apache commons utilities.
Are there similar things available for iPhone development? Where do I find them?
I attended the WWDC conference this year but it was of no help in this matter. Apple seems to think everyone writes all their own code from scratch. That seems unlikely.
Thanks.
Two that I like out of many
http://code.google.com/p/sqlitepersistentobjects/ like orm for sqlite
And
OpenCV can be used on iphone
http://lambdajive.wordpress.com/2008/12/20/cross-compiling-for-iphone/
Core Plot is for both MacOS and iOS.
Three20 seems popular but I have not used it.
PhoneGap is intended as a platform but has some utility as a library.
cocos2d is a popular sprite animation library.