Custom UI Controls for iOS and Mac OS X | Hacker News Reader

Custom UI Controls for iOS and Mac OS X

cocoacontrols.com

116 pointsalpb24 comments

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I'm the creator of the site. I'm not sure why this is showing up on here right now, but I'm certainly not complaining!

Please let me know if you have any questions, I'll check back on the thread throughout the day.

Thanks making this available.

My pleasure, glad you like!

edit: hi, fellow Seattleite!

I also have made great use of this great menu of cocoa controls. Thanks for creating it and keeping it up! I do occasionally wonder about the name "controls" for this kind of components. But it seems to be how most people refer to them.

I chose it based on a couple factors:

* I had posted something to my personal blog back in 2005 when I worked for Microsoft that made reference to them as such ('control' is a pretty standard term in MS vernacular). The blog post ended up being ranked #1 on google for the search term "cocoa controls", so I wanted to take advantage of that google juice as much as possible

* The unhyphenated, dot-com domain was available, which was a pretty big deal to me

* I like the alliteration :)

Thanks, and yes, it does roll off one's tongue :)

You're doing good stuff, although sometimes we have trouble keeping up with the demands from developers; any thoughts on adding "monetization" links? (Guess we could do this in our GitHub readme too...)

By the way, how are you determining license type? What exactly are you scraping on GitHub to determine this? http://www.cocoacontrols.com/platforms/ios/controls/openspri...

Thanks!

Can you be more specific about monetization links? What form would you like to see this take? We do offer the ability to commercially license your controls via our site (e.g. you could dual-license your control and offer commercial support for a fee).

License type: totally 100% manual right now. When the repo is first added to Cocoa Controls, a field is filled out for specifying which licenses the control is made available under. This information may get out of date as time passes (I've seen many instances where a developer changes from GPL -> MIT or Apache 2.0, e.g.).

I actually asked GitHub to make license a first class piece of repository metadata a few weeks ago, but no clue when or if this will ever be added.

> Can you be more specific about monetization links?

I don't mean to confuse this with a license type... we get about a 30 referrals a week from your site (nice traffic for a control!) and just wondering if we can direct them somehow to try the app which actually uses the control. Does Apple have an app store affiliate program? Maybe you can leverage that somehow?

> When the repo is first added to Cocoa Controls, a field is filled out for specifying which licenses the control is made available under

Can this be updated, manually?

Ah, I see what you're saying. Let me think about that a little more, and see if we can figure something out. I'm looking at letting control authors edit their controls without ever having to go through me (I'm planning on setting up an audit log to prevent spam), and I think that—as part of this—I might allow sanitized HTML in the description field for a control. So, that way you'd be able to point people to your website.

> Can this be updated, manually?

By me, yes. By you, not yet. Shoot me an email (it's in my profile), and let me know what you want changed.

Fantastic site! It'd be great if there was more metadata ahead of time to such as:

- Memory management model (ARC, GC, or refcount)

- Min/Max OS X version or SDK

- If it is sandboxable

It'd also be fun to see a list of projects which use the controls.

Great suggestions, thanks!

Great resource, but we've always found the issue with these to be the level of polish expected on iOS.

On occasion you spend as much time customizing these controls to fit with your UX/UI as you do building it from scratch.

As an added benefit, building from scratch gives you a clean room implementation.

This is great. I like the search-by-license, but there needs to be more categorization for browsing. Where I don't have a designer on staff for my projects, I will often find myself browsing for a component that can "fit in". Paging through 50 pages is too much, though.

Totally agree. I've been meaning to do this, but I haven't quite found the time yet. Good to know it would be helpful; I'll make sure it's properly prioritized.

No worries. Thanks for putting this out there!

Back in the late 90's / early 00's custom components in Delphi were a big thing. I recall there were quite a few sites dedicated to listing all the latest and greatest components.

It's great to see something similar specifically dedicated to Cocoa/UIKit controls.

I submitted this but I'm pretty sure there are similar websites out there. If anyone knows one please comment here.

There's also the objective-c category over at Binpress - http://www.binpress.com/browse/objective-c

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders

Good resource, and the upside is if they're licensed well and missing polish then the community gets better.

At first glance, this looks like a great way to find those controls instead of making them myself.

Definitely going to use some of these on a current project :)

Great resource. Thank you! Does anybody knows a similar resource for Android controls?

Excellent idea. This beats my mile-long Github watch list.

Awesome resource

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