Working independently on personal iOS projects, I’d used a couple of Objective-C open source libraries and wanted to share what they are.

SBJSON1 converts JSON text responses from a web API to NSDictionary objects, and MBProgressHUD2 provides a loading animation that can be used to improve the user experience during long running processes.

I had the opportunity to do some development on the primary consumer iOS app where I work (a top 10 app (!) in the free “lifestyle” category), and it uses a lot more open source projects than the 2 mentioned above. The list below contains some of those libraries in use by the application, which is iOS 4 or earlier as of this writing.

I don’t have direct experience with all of the libraries below, but I wanted to share the list as a starting point for further investigation by myself or by you, and to provide a little extra advertising for the projects since we’re finding them useful.

  • TTStyle and TTUrlRequest - Part of Three203 from Facebook. ttstyle provides various UIView features like borders, fills, text and more. I typically used Interface Builder to lay views out, but have seen the flexibility and control of building views programmatically, and now prefer that approach, having some help from my colleague. tturlrequest is an HTTP request library, from the creator: “a replacement for NSURLRequest which supports a disk cache.” A cached web request response on disk would be available between application restarts.

  • GRMustache4 - Objective-C implementation of Mustache. Mustache templates can be used to share view-layer templates between a web browser and an iOS view. Personally I think the Mustache style of templating makes a lot of sense. In Ruby on the server, having a hash of the attributes going to the template is very explicit and clear, I like it better than ERB, and Mustache is implemented in a lot of languages. The template and data can be rendered in objective-c on the device, or in the browser in JavaScript.

  • FTUtils5 - Animation library. Ships with some canned UIView animations. I have not used this personally.

  • Google Toolbox for Mac6 7. Various features. Has OAuth connection controller code for iOS.

  • oauthconsumer 8 - OAuth consumer library. I have not used this.

  • regexkitlite 9 - Adds additional regular expression functionality beyond what objective-c provides, to NSArray and many more objects, through categories.

  • KIF 10 - User interface-level (integration/”outside-in”) testing from Square. I have not built a KIF test script yet, but testing a happy path flow through the application would be a valuable regression test.

  • Google Analytics SDK for iOS 11 - Track activity in google analytics, “pageviews”, events, and more.

Conclusion

So there you have it, 10 open source iOS libraries to check out for your project. I hope this introduction was somewhat useful. Please leave a comment if you have some favorite libraries of your own.

  1. SBJSON ↩

  2. MBProgressHUD ↩

  3. Three20 ↩

  4. GRMustache ↩

  5. FTUtils ↩

  6. Google Toolbox for Mac #1 ↩

  7. Google Toolbox for Mac #2 ↩

  8. OAuth Consumer ↩

  9. RegExKit Lite ↩

  10. KIF ↩

  11. Google Analytics SDK iOS ↩