This lecture discusses the value of finding and incorporating third party libraries and frameworks into your iOS app. Why re-invent the wheel when you can developer a much better iOS app with less work? We mention a number of commonly used 3rd party iOS frameworks, and also provide short tutorial on using CocoaPods - the de facto standard for managing dependencies in iOS projects. This lecture is part of a course intended to be an intensive and very compressed deep dive into iOS development in Swift. Visit the course web page to get copies of the course outline, lecture notes, sample code, etc. Course website: http://www.themobilemontage.com/2015/05/12/ios-bootcamp-learning-to-create-awesome-apps-on-ios-using-swift/

1. Using 3rd Party Libraries /
Frameworks in iOS
Lecture 09
Jonathan R. Engelsma, Ph.D.

2. TOPICS
• Motivation
• UsefulThird Party Libraries
• Working with CocoaPods

3. WHY USE 3RD PARTY
LIBRARIES?
• Duh…..
• Avoid reinventing the wheel?
• Take advantage of tons of amazing open source software -
often written by smarter-than-average developers!
• Make your app more feature rich (and shiny) with less work!

4. AFNETWORKING
• Most popular networking library for iOS
• Extends the foundation networking frameworks on
iOS.
• More info: https://github.com/AFNetworking/
AFNetworking

5. NIMBUS
• iOS toolkit with commonly needed
components
• Well documented!
• http://nimbuskit.info/

6. CORE PLOT
• 2D Plotting Framework for iOS
and OS X.
• Supports a wide variety of
different kinds of graphs/plots.
• https://github.com/core-plot/core-
plot

7. FMDB
• An Cocoa/Objective-C wrapper around SQLite
• Higher level API that makes interacting with SQLite DB’s easy.
• https://github.com/ccgus/fmdb

8. SSTOOLKIT
• a collection of well-documented iOS
classes for making life easier by
solving common problems all iOS
developers face.
• http://sstoolk.it/

9. MBPROGRESSHUD
• translucent HUD with an indicator
and/or labels while work is being done
in a background thread.
• https://github.com/jdg/
MBProgressHUD

10. • Style your native iOS/Android apps using CSS
• Open source project has graduated into a startup
(pixate.com - beautiful but not free)!
• http://www.freestyle.org/

11. FONT AWESOME FOR IOS
• a Objective-C category that brings Font
awesome (an iconic font) to iOS.
• https://github.com/alexdrone/ios-
fontawesome

12. COCOACONTROLS.COM

13. COCOAPODS
• A popular dependency manager for Objective-C projects.
• Thousands of libraries/frameworks supported.
• Popular in the open source community.
• http://cocoapods.org/

14. WHY A DEPENDENCY MGR?
• Why not just manually download library/framework and add
to your project?
• library code is stored in each project you use it, wasting
space.
• No global catalog of available libraries that you can search..
• Difficult to update libraries to a new version, especially if
several libraries need to be updated together.
• You will be tempted to modify the code, making future
updates difficult!

15. COCOAPODS DEMO