Here’s a rather nicely executed control for space-efficient options presentation from @joseph_carney:

joecarney / JCGridMenu

This is a simple IOS control that works as a 44x44px menu using rows and columns to show and hide options. It’s not big but it is clever, here is the obligatory screen shot…

Check out the video here to see more capabilities as well as the rather elegant animations. Nice piece of work, yep. Think we’ll drop it right into a video app we needed an elegant way to overlay some controls on, actually.

And Messr. Carney gets a gold medal with oak leaf clusters for the Best. License. EVAR:

Licence

What licence? I built this code for me to solve a problem. It solved my problem. I open sourced as I thought it might benefit the developer community at large.

Use it if you want to use it but don’t come crying to me if it doesn’t work.

If you want to pretend you built it first and start selling it as your own, then grow up and stop being a prick. Nobody wants to buy shit like this, you’ll never be Steve Jobs so wake up and smell the roses.

If you do use it and your app has millions of downloads, all because of the fact that you implemented my menu, then some sort of recognition somewhere would be cool.

Other than that, do with it what you will…

Heh. The WTFPL Non-Prickish Attribution License, we could call it?

So no doubt you’ve heard — and if you haven’t, pay close attention! — that IAP cracking is now easily available,

iAP Cracker by urus; it cracks easy dlc/inapp purchases. As long as the game/app doesn’t check the purchase with a server. It uses mobilesubstrate for this: buy something inapp like normal and youll get it free!

and if you haven’t set it up yet, been thinking “Huh, maybe I should get on that Verifying Store Receipts bit, like, now…”

… well, has the Camera Plus dude and friends got a service for you: Beeblex!

IAP validation. Easy and free.

Simple, secure and free IAP validation for iOS apps.

No strings attached. We promise!

Validate receipts securely

Beeblex verifies IAP receipts against Apple’s servers to help prevent receipt spoofing and man-in-the-middle IAP attacks

We use strong encryption and time-limited tokens to make it very hard for an attacker to send fake receipts to your app.

Easy to use

Beeblex is a fully-hosted service. There is no need for you to install server-side software, or rent any extra hardware.

Integration in your app is easy with out SDK—in most cases, you should be able to get going in a matter of minutes.

Free forever

Beeblex is free, and we intend to keep it free. There are no catches, no time limited trials, no limits.

Well, there doesn’t really sound like there’s any downside here, does there now? For those of us who incline to the cynical, be reassured by

Why are you making this available for free?

Frankly, because we can, and because someone should. We develop iOS apps ourselves, and IAP receipt verification is more complicated than it needs to be.

We thought that a service like Beeblex could help developers of all sizes, including ourselves; therefore, we simply created it.

At some point, we plan on adding more for-pay services, but the basic verification service will remain completely free.

The iOS community is just full of such nice people, isn’t it now? SDK is on github, check it out!

UPDATES:

A Ruby Gem/CLI For Easy iOS In-App Purchase Validation On Your Own Server if you really want.

Here’s a nice-looking abstraction of retrieving pictures from probably all the online services you’ll want to support:

pierrotsmnrd / grabKit

In your iPhone/iPad applications, you may want to let your users access their photo albums hosted on various social networks like Facebook or FlickR, or stored in the device. Unfortunately, the websites hosting these images offer different APIs and different libraries to authentify a user, grab its photo albums, etc.

GrabKit is made to wrap these differences into a simple library. Retrieve photo albums the same way for Facebook, FlickR, or any other implemented service !

So far, GrabKit supports :

• Facebook
• Flickr
• Instagram
• Picasa
• iPhone/iPad

Compare to Photo Picker+ we mentioned before; similar functionality, but doesn’t require an account with any third party, just the appropriate services directly.

h/t: ManiacDev!

So, you really really want to get inside your users’ UX flow? Or feel like putting together a Greatest User Epic Fail demo reel? Either way, here’s a new SDK for you to check out:

UserVOD: Watch how people use your app

UserVOD is a mobile SDK that helps developers gain insights on how people use their app.

Our SDK records videos of user sessions and captures their actions and gestures…

… Screen recording is done without impacting user experience. Videos are uploaded when users are idle and on WiFi only.

You can take a look at some samples or try it out for yourself before integrating it into your own apps, which is pretty much simple as simple gets, whether you’re running a UIKit or OpenGL or even a Unity app.

Also check out this TechCrunch article on them for references to other session recording options!

Got some artists in your asset workflow who just won’t let go of that antiquated Flash thingy? This could be of help:

musictheory / SwiffCore

SwiffCore is a Mac OS X and iOS framework that renders vector shapes and animations stored in the SWF format. It also provides basic support for bitmaps, fonts, text, and MP3 streams.

It isn’t a Flash runtime. It doesn’t enable you to run your interactive Flash games on iOS. It will, however, accurately render your existing vector graphics and animations…

Had a particularly good chuckle at this bit:

… Ultimately, performance depends on the source movie. If SwiffCore has to redraw several objects per frame, and those frames contain gradients and/or complex paths, it’s easy to saturate the CPU and drop frames (even on A5 devices). After a few migraine-inducing Instruments sessions, I am very grateful that Apple never allowed Flash on the original iPhone …

Indeed. Of course it’s not polite to speak ill of the dead, but it can be rather amusing at times, can’t it? Any-ways, although we certainly wouldn’t give the impression that we actually recommend these days any kind of canned animation producer other than the HTML 5 options we touched on a few days back, there definitely have been instances where something that dealt with Flash would have been expedient. And hey, expedience can be its own form of elegance when getting something out the door profitably is the order of the day!

h/t: ManiacDev!

So no doubt if you even vaguely follow computer vision type stuff you’ve heard of the OpenCV library, and as we’ve mentioned occasionally people have been using it on iOS with some degree of effort for a while now; but as of the latest release (2.4.2) it’s officially supported:

…. opencv2.framework for iOS has been created. You can either download the binary from SourceForge or build it yourself using the simple guide. Also, you may be interested to look at some OpenCV on iOS samples, created by our GSoC 2012 students Eduard and Charu and read the slides of the tutorial…

Speaking of tutorials, here’s a series just updated (h/t @romainbriche) for iOS to get you started nice and easy processing both video frames and saved photos:

OpenCV Tutorial – a collection of OpenCV samples for iPhone/iPad – Part 1

OpenCV Tutorial – Part 2

OpenCV Tutorial – Part 3

OpenCV Tutorial – Part 4

Code for these is on github at BloodAxe / OpenCV-Tutorial if you’re in a hurry.

And of course there’s the regular docs and the wiki and the code site and all that, but if you have any more up to date iOS-focused resources, please let us all know!

Here’s a good library to start with if you have some document import needs for your app:

DZen-Interaktiv / DZDocumentsPickerController

iPhone/iPad controller to import file from multiple sources, such as Image Library, iTunes shared folder, and cloud services like Dropbox, Cloud App, iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, SugarSync, BOX, and many more.

Until now, only Dropbox and Cloud App are operational, and Microsoft SkyDrive is half-way in.

This idea was born because of a common need to all iOS users of importing documents regardless the source. I am sharing this controller so you can enjoy it in your own apps and collaborate with the development. You are very welcome to fork it or help me out with the debugging!

Sounds like a good project to contribute to if you’ve got some cloud needs of your own!

h/t: ManiacDev!

Here’s a new option to be aware of if you’ve got some lightweight OpenGL needs:

Introducing Rend – A lightweight Objective-C OpenGL ES 2.0 framework for iOS

When looking for a framework to use for upcoming projects I looked at three existing options, Cocos2D, Cocos3D and Unity. None of those seemed perfect for my needs. Cocos2D obviously doesn’t have very good 3D support, Cocos3D didn’t have shader support, and Unity seemed to bloated and hard to integrate with UIKit.

So on my summer vacation last year I decided to start creating my own framework …

… My focus has been to create a framework that focuses on rendering and that could easily be integrated with UIKit. Unlike Cocos and Unity, it doesn’t have any support for actions, physics or sound, but it’s can do pure rendering very well. I’ve spent quite some time profiling my projects trying to get rid of the worst bottlenecks in the framework, so it should be quite fast when used in a good way.

If that looks like something that might suit your project, check it out at antonholmquist / rend-ios!

h/t: @romainbriche!

Oooh, here’s a good tip for dealing with the layout issues you’ve very likely noticed if you embed fonts hunted down from the wild Internet into your app:

Custom iOS fonts and how to fix the vertical position problem

Most of the custom fonts i’ve used usually have some issue with their vertical alignment. Either they sit too low or too high when compared to the default fonts. This poses a lot of problems and makes it quite difficult to get things aligned properly. The cause of this is that your custom font has an ascender and descender settings which are not being rendered properly by iOS…

… To edit these in the font you will need to download the Apple Font Tool Suite. Once you’ve installed this you need to open Terminal and navigate to the directory that contains your font. After that enter the following command:

Managed to completely overlook the existence of these until now, though they’ve apparently been around for over a decade. Look pretty handy for mucking around with oddly behaving fonts, they do!

h/t: ‏@romainbriche!

Here’s an interesting strategy for adding some narrative content into your app, specifically game tutorials:

Hype – How To Play

We wanted something that would accomplish the following goals:

• Quickly teach the players the basics of game play
• Look integrated into the app
• No download or streamed content
• Measurable
• We don’t want to inflate the App size too much
• Something we can create without too much custom programming

What we ended up with was a how to play integrated tutorial that was implemented with an imbedded WebView that plays back HTML 5 generated via Hype…

Hadn’t noticed the delightfully named Hype before, but it seems more or less along the lines of Sencha Animator or Adobe Edge, bringing Flash-style authoring to the HTML/CSS world. (What’s your tool of choice for that kind of thing, Dear Reader?)

Also of interest is the bit about setting up the player to track events with Flurry — it uses an iframe strategy we hadn’t seen before, derived from

UIWebView Secrets – Part3 – How to Properly Call ObjectiveC From Javascript

which if you haven’t stumbled across it already, describes an approach to communicating between JavaScript and real code which you might want to check out at ochameau / NativeBridge for your UIWebView communication needs!