iOS & macOS development

I recently noticed this question about different-colored spinning progress indicators on Stack Overflow, and finally got around to giving my answer. I’m not sure if the original question was answered satisfactorily by using a UIActivityIndicatorView, but I hope my code can be useful to someone.

I have implemented two different clones of the spinning NSProgressIndicator, which can be drawn at any size and in any color. One is a subclass of NSView, and can be used on OS X 10.4, and the other is a subclass of CALayer, and can be used in a CoreAnimation-based project on OS X 10.5, and presumably on an iPhone (though I haven’t actually tested that yet).

I put the code up on github (both the NSView-based version and the CoreAnimation-based one), under the BSD license. They each include the spinning progress indicator classes and an example app showing how they can be used. The code should be pretty straight-forward. One caveat is that they might not be super fast performance-wise, but should be good for most uses.

✔ Sources: https://github.com/kelan/yrk-spinning-progress-indicator-layer

To be successful on the App Store, your app needs to stand out. The vanilla user-interface “look and feel” provided by Apple just doesn’t cut it any more in a crowded market.

Many of the most popular apps on the App Store present standard iOS UI elements in a non-standard fashion:
Twitter employs a custom UITabBar
Instagram uses both a custom UITabBar and a custom UINavigationBar
Epicurious for iPad customizes elements of the standard split-view interface

Prior to iOS 5, many developers had to take somewhat unconventional approaches to achieve these results. Although subclassing and overriding drawRect: was the recommended approach, many resorted to the dreaded “method swizzling”.
But with iOS 5, those dark days are over! iOS 5 has included many new APIs you can use to easily customize the appearance of various UIKit controls.

To illustrate some of these new APIs, in this tutorial we’re going to take a “plain vanilla” app about surfing trips and customize the UI to get a more “beach-themed” look-and-feel.