LittleBox

Little Box, Big iOS Tools

LittleBox is a grab-bag of single-purpose tools which will be useful in some way or another in almost any iOS application. The code originated as internal supporting classes and utilities written at Klout for use in our iPhone application. We chose the pieces of code that were the best encapsulated and most useful, then teased them out of our application and into this library. We also added substantial documentation in the form of well-formatted comments throughout the code. Read on for a detailed list of what's inside.

Please note: this release (v0.9) is considered unstable. We do use all of these classes in our production application, however not every use case has the benefit of being hardened in that context. The public interfaces are also subject to change as we iterate and gather feedback. Please be sure to test your usage thoroughly, and we welcome your fixes, improvements, and suggestions.

Included functionality:

Singleton Management

• LBBaseSingleton makes declaring and managing app singletons easier and more robust.

• LBBaseMultiDelegateSingleton allows singletons to broadcast messages to multiple delegates/observers without the limitations of NSNotificationCenter or KVO.

• LBSingletonResetManager provides the ability to reset state on all your singletons at once.

Utility Singletons

• LBBaseEventLogger provides a central singleton for the collection of debug log and analytics event data, fanning the information out to various destinations such as the console, third party analytics SDKs (think Flurry, Mixpanel, etc), as well as a custom backend event collector endpoint if you have one.

• LBGlobalFullScreenSpinner centrally manages a full-screen activity indicator that can be triggered from anywhere in the app.

• LBNetworkStatusSpinnerManager centrally manages the state of the network status indicator in the iOS status bar among multiple simultaneous application network activites.

Views

• LBAnnotatedUIButton extends UIButton with an extra userInfo NSDictionary property, and has handy methods for using it to create tap targets that overlay UILabels or other views.

• LBStyledActivityIndicator simplifies the presentation of an activity indicator in a few different standard visual styles.

Other Utilities

• LBLog.h defines simple macros, LBLog() and LBLogRaw(), that you should use instead of NSLog for console debugging.

• LBUtils is a collection of one-off utility methods that cover:

  • string processing
  • date processing
  • image manipulation
  • OAuth 1.0a header and signature generation
  • CGRect and UIView geometry manipulation

• LBTimer is a wrapper for NSTimer that avoids the problematic retain cycle typically associated with use of NSTimer.

• LBZeroingWeakContainer is an object reference wrapper class useful for storing objects in an NSArray or other container without retaining those objects.

• LBCLLocationManagerProxy is an experimental mock object that can simulate location changes on a device for use in testing region monitoring or other location tracking code.

Project Requirements

• ARC. (To those not using it yet: why not just change your project over to ARC and apply the -fno-objc-arc compiler flag to all your unmigrated files?)

• iOS 5.0+ deployment targets. Various iOS 5+ features are used such as zeroing weak references.

• If you want to use LBCLLocationManagerProxy you will need the CoreLocation framework. See installation below.

Installation

The easiest way to install this library is to simply copy the LittleBox folder into a location in your project folder via the filesystem, then add the new folder to your project via XCode.

If you like the LBLog and LBLogRaw macros, you should add an import statement for LBLog.h into your project's precompiled header prefix file, which is usually named something like "YourProjectName-Prefix.pch" somewhere in your XCode project. This will allow you to use the macros without having to explicitly import LBLog.h in each source file.

Note: if you want to use LBCLLocationManagerProxy, you will need to link the CoreLocation framework to your project and you will also need to add a declaration to your project build settings to enable the compilation of the class: go to your project build settings and add "DEFINE_LBCLLOCATIONMANAGERPROXY=1" (without quotes) to the "Preprocessor Macros Not Used In Precompiled Headers" section. See LBCLLocationManagerProxy.h for more info.

Contributors

• Josh Whiting (@yetanotherjosh), https://github.com/jwhiting
• Mustafa Furniturewala, https://github.com/mustafa
• Ian Kallen (@spidaman),https://github.com/spidaman