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You start with an (obviously) great idea. You go hunting on the web, trying to find people who are in the same business, possibly the same idea. You find maybe one or two similar services, but come up with great ideas on how to differentiate almost immediately. Things are looking good, let’s roll! A while after, it’s more often than not a TechCrunch post, you read an article about a company doing something very close to what you are working on. You feel somewhat motivated, but also stressed out, they’re ahead. What if they are soon known for being the go-to-place for what you wanted to offer? Time to speed up, you add features, you move faster, you long for early reviews/previews/beta-testers. Feedback is scarce, and not very insightful. You would pay for good feedback. Then, huge investment announcement for this random company you never heard of, they just got shitloads of cash. You, well, you still have your lousy personal bank account, thousands of lines of PHP code and a dream. As days go by, your hyper-excitement fades out, maybe it’s not a good idea after all, maybe it’s a waste of time. You release a tiny preview, nobody cares. So my idea isn’t good enough? Minutes later, your feed reader delivers new depressing updates. Huge investment, everyone’s in it, from Ron Conway, Adreessen Horowitz to Dustin Moskovitz. Panic creeps in. It’s been a long time, the end of year one is approaching. Profit? A few hundred, maybe a few thousand dollars, maybe nothing. And to make matters worse, someone releases a product, with hundreds of thousands of users. Complete nobodies, how could you miss them?? And they do what you do, but they do it really, really good. They have cash, they have an absolute stunning design, the right vision, they are fucking nice on their website and if you weren’t competing against them, hell, you would post that idea all over the internet because it rocks.
If you develop already for Android, then you know what it is so you can skip to the next section. For the others of us: a toast is a spécial way to display 'non intrusive' message to the user. Those message are displayed on a configurable place on the screen and they disapear after a configurable time interval. The way they appear is similar to the way the Growl app (on mac do). A toast is a view containing a quick little message for the user. The toast class helps you create and show those. When the view is shown to the user, appears as a floating view over the application. It will never receive focus. The user will probably be in the middle of typing something else. The idea is to be as unobtrusive as possible, while still showing the user the information you want them to see. Two examples are the volume control, and the brief message saying that your settings have been saved.
WhirlyGlobe is an interactive 3D globe toolkit for ios. It handles the rendering and data manipulation side and strives to maintain a constant frame rate. It's pretty and it's quite good. It can be used to display a few data points on the earth or as a center piece for an earth based app.
Simple and easy to use clustering mapView for iOS.
An iOS objective-c library template for mimic the sidebar layout of the new Facebook app.
A handy class that prompts users of your iPhone or Mac App Store app to rate your application after using it for a while. Similar to Appirater, but with a simpler, cleaner interface and automatic support for iOS fast application switching.
Expandable Input Toolbar in the style of the iPhone messages app
A UITableViewCell subclass that has a customizable badge view on the right. With fast Quartz 2D path drawing and blending, one can use this with very large data set and still keep great performance when scrolling.
As seen in Instagram, Path, DailyBooth, and other apps, place a button in the center of a UITabBar to let the user perform some action that is central to the application's purpose.
A subclass of UIButton that provides imageless gradients. Drop-in compatible with any project.
Photo viewer control, like in the Apple Photos app.
Duplicates the look and feel of Apple's Photos apps.
A Springboard-like launcher, as seen in the Facebook iOS app.