Under the Bridge

Here’s a new library open sourced on github that looks pretty interesting: NMView!

Apple has gone a long way making it easy for iOS developers to create complex UIs, thanks to Interface Builder…

For creating a UIView component yourself, however, there is no standard way of using Interface Builder to graphically create the layout of your component. You are left to write many lines of code to arrange existing components into view hierarchies, change their properties only to notice that what you wrote in code did not lead to the intended layout. This process is tedious and convincing people to create their own UIView component is difficult since creating them is no fun.

To simplify the process of implementing UIView components, we’ve created NMView. NMView is a UIView subclass which defines a standard mechanism of associating a nib file with the view and how its contents are loaded into the view. Additionally, it provides advanced features like specifying different view layouts (eg. landscape vs. portrait) in the nib file which can either manually or automatically be activated based on the aspect ratio of the view…

We particularly like that feature. Here’s the included sample showing differing portrait/landscape layouts:

… with smooth animation of the individual views between the layouts as you rotate. Nice work. Can think of a couple projects that would’ve been mighty handy on. So yes, we thoroughly recommend you take a look at NMView as a handy addition to your bag of tricks!