This is a collection of libraries, frameworks and resources for handling common tasks on iOS and OSX. It prefers tools that are simple, small and modular.
Current best practice might be to use the Apple provided UICollectionView for iOS 6+
A performant Grid-View for iOS (iPhone/iPad) that allows sorting of views with gestures (the user can move the items with his finger to sort them) and pinching/rotating/panning gestures allow the user to play with the view and toggle from the cellview to a fullsize display.
IIIThumbFlow is a simple iOS view component for presenting images in a vertical flow style. It supports both local and web images. It's optimized in various aspects, you can load unlimited images in IIIThumbFlow. This looks alot like a masonry/pinterest view component.
Objective-C reusable scrollable grid view for Cocoa Touch modeled after UITableView.
n.b. - I have not looked into which is best. Just dumping the popular ones here for now.
JASidePanels is a UIViewController container designed for presenting a center panel with revealable side panels - one to the left and one to the right. The main inspiration for this project is the menuing system in Path 2.0 and Facebook's iOS apps.
From what I can tell, this is the most actively used and supported side panel.
PKRevealController is a delightful view controller container for iOS, enabling you to present multiple controllers on top of one another.
A carefully implemented iOS objective-c library to mimic the sidebar layout of the new Facebook app and Path 2.0 app. (archive)
Author notes that this implementation is old and users should generally look for a newer one that takes advantage of technologies in iOS 5 & 6.
FTWButton is a UIControl subclass that lets you easily set color, gradient, text, shadow, border, and icon properties for various states and animates between them.
ALActionBlocks is an Objective-C category on UIControl that allows for handling of control events with blocks. As opposed to using @selectors.
A drop-in replacement for UISegmentedControl mimicking the style of the segmented control used in Google Currents and various other Google products.
A drop-in replacement for UILabel that supports attributes, data detectors, links, and more
UILabel that supports NSAttributedString
Not sure how this differs from TTTAttributedLabel, but TTTAttributedLabel credits this so my intuition is to prefer TTTAttrributedLabel
THLabel is a subclass of UILabel, which additionally allows shadow blur, stroke text and fill gradient
Asynchronous image downloader with cache support with an UIImageView category.
This library provides a category for UIImageVIew with support for remote images coming from the web. This seems to be the current best implementation of fetching and caching images from the web.
Anything involving images pulled from the web should be handled asynchronously. This is a powerful, modular set of classes for handling web images simply. There are base classes to build UIButtons and UIImageViews on. The image caching is handled by a separate cache (EGOCache by default)
It has a nice convenience in that it also caches processed images. So you might have one URL and a few different sizes cached for it.
MOOMaskedIconView is a UIView subclass that uses black-and-white masks to draw icons of different styles at any size or resolution. It's like Photoshop layer styles, using the same technique as UITabBar to generate various effects from a single icon mask.
Photoshop layer styles for iOS icons. Stop maintaining a separate file for each color, resolution, and style. MOOMaskedIconView is a UIView subclass that uses black-and-white masks to draw icons of different styles at any size or resolution. It's like Photoshop layer styles, using the same technique as UITabBar to generate various effects from a single icon mask.
RNBlurModal adds depth to the traditional modal/alert view. Calling the view is incredibly similar to setting up and showing a UIAlertView. You can also setup your own custom views and display them with a blurry background. The goal is to truly draw the user's focus directly to your alert using natural effects. This project works on all iOS devices at all orientations with ARC.
Beautifully done UIAlertView and UIActionSheet replacements inspired by TweetBot
YRDropdownView is a view library for displaying stylish alerts, warnings, and errors.
Easy to use and customizable messages/notifications for iOS à la Tweetbot
Non-modal, non-intrusive Info Panel implementation as seen on some "popular" apps
Not certain one this one looks like because I haven't downloaded.
MBProgressHUD is an iOS drop-in class that displays a translucent HUD with an indicator and/or labels while work is being done in a background thread. The HUD is meant as a replacement for the undocumented, private UIKit UIProgressHUD with some additional features.
SVProgressHUD is a clean and easy-to-use HUD meant to display the progress of an ongoing task.
Simple block-based alerts and huds for iPhone apps.
The KOAProgressBar is a custom progress bar for iOS 5.0+ with a full controll over animation.
A UIView progress bar that has a fairly full set of styling features.
WARNING: This code looks to be "All rights reserved" & not freely usable.
TimesSquare is an Objective-C calendar view for apps.
A UI Element that hovers beside the scroll bar of a UITableView (Mimicking the Path app).
A "drop-in" solution for building stylish app introductions and tutorials. Now supports left-to-right and right-to-left languages.
A demo project for the UITableViewCell subclass ELCTextFieldCell to help with form creation
QuickDialog - Quick and easy dialog screens for iOS
A similar control to the pull down to refresh control created by atebits in Tweetie 2.
There are a handful of ways to implement pull to refresh, so hear are some other examples to examine
Core Plot is a plotting framework for OS X and iOS. It provides 2D visualization of data, and is tightly integrated with Apple technologies like Core Animation, Core Data, and Cocoa Bindings.
A CAKeyframeAnimation subclass that lets you quickly and easily set a number of bounces, and start and end values, and creates an animation for you.
SKBounceAnimation is a CAKeyframeAnimation subclass that creates an animation for you based on start and end values and a number of bounces. It’s based on the math and technology in this blogpost which in turn was based partially on Matt Gallagher’s work.
Describe multi-step UIView animation sequences declaratively.
Natural Language Date/Time Parser Using Lex/Yacc/C
Moment handles simple and complex expressions. Because it's written in C, it can easily be transferred to many other languages.
FormatterKit is a collection of well-crafted NSFormatter subclasses for things like units of information, distance, and relative time intervals. Each formatter abstracts away the complex business logic of their respective domain, so that you can focus on the more important aspects of your application.
An NSDate category for turning NSDates into plain english NSStrings.
Date Calculations for Cocoa Inspired by Ruby on Rails
An NSDate category for creating and manipulating dates with plain English method names (eg. [NSDate endOfWeek], [NSDate yesterday]).
I think the consensus is that Apple's implementation is fast enough. But that JSONKit is still slightly faster. Your networking library will generally have some JSON support.
Alternatives
A delightful iOS and OS X networking framework
RestKit is a framework for consuming and modeling RESTful web resources on iOS and OS X
SSToolkit makes life easier. It is made up of various view controllers, views, and categories that I use in all of my apps. Feel free to fork the repo and make it better.
The iOS framework that grows only as fast as its documentation
A full featured framework that helps accomplish many common tasks on iOS. The successor to Three20Framework.
Drop in sharing features for all iPhone and iPad apps
Live crash report management for iOS and Mac OS X. AppStore ready on iOS only! Follow news on Twitter
This requires hosting your own PHP server to run. HockeyApp open sources the code and offers the hosting as a paid service.
A software update kit for iOS and Android. Provided as is. For more functionality and maintained work
This requires hosting your own PHP server to run. HockeyApp open sources the code and offers the hosting as a paid service.
Kiwi is a Behavior Driven Development library for iOS development. The goal is to provide a BDD library that is exquisitely simple to setup and use.
May make writing tests easier and clearer.
Routable, an in-app native URL router, for iOS
A custom iOS status bar overlay seen in Apps like Reeder, Evernote and Google Mobile App
Makes dealing with the keychain on iPhone a little simpler.
Put controls above the keyboard on your iPhone or iPad app.
It's an universal solution for keyboard avoiding for iOS that allows automatically change content inset of UIScrollView and it's subclasses. When keyboard is presented you will be able to see all content of your scroll views.
A set of Objective-C additions and macros that helps you write code more quickly.