Education Ecosystem Blog

Having the right tools enables a Livecoding.tv engineer to produce high-quality projects. Today we will share some of our secrets with you as to what ObjC and Swift ‘iOS’ productivity tools, plugins, and libraries  does our streamers use to assist us to be highly proficient.

What Is ObjC and Swift (iOS)?

“Swift is a general-purpose programming language built using a modern approach to safety, performance, and software design patterns.The goal of the Swift project is to create the best available language for uses ranging from systems programming, to mobile and desktop apps, scaling up to cloud services… Objective-C is an object-oriented strict superset of C and is the language of choice for development with Mac OS X or the GNUStep Foundation classes… Swift’s compatibility with Objective-C lets you create a project that contains files written in either language. You can use this feature, called mix and match, to write apps that have a mixed-language codebase. Using mix and match, you can implement part of your app’s functionality using the latest Swift features and seamlessly incorporate it back into your existing Objective-C codebase.” (Apple’s iOS Developer Library). Just recently Apple has Released  Swift 2.2 along with Xcode 7.3. Swift 2.2 now has improvements in components tab, new expressions, improvement to the standard library among other things

ObjC and Swift ‘iOS’ Productivity Tools, Plugins & Libraries

Here are the ten (10) best ObjC and Swift ‘iOS’ productivity tools, plugins, and libraries rnecommeded by Livecoding.tv engineers:

Xcode

The Xcode IDE is at the center of the Apple development experience. Tightly integrated with the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, Xcode is an incredibly productive environment for building apps for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.

SwiftJSON

JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON for short, is a common way to transmit data to and from web services. It is simple to use and human-readable, which is why it’s so incredibly popular. SwiftJSON is the better way to deal with JSON data in Swift.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is an open source solution for building cross-platform mobile apps with standards-based Web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, CSS.

GHUnit

GHUnit is a test framework for Mac OS X and iOS. It can be used standalone or with other testing frameworks like SenTestingKit or GTM.

Eureka

Eureka is a library to create dynamic table-view forms from a DSL specification in Swift. This DSL basically consists of Rows, Sections and Forms. A Form is a collection of Sections and a Section is a collection of Rows.

RX Swift

Rx is a generic abstraction of computation expressed through Observable<Element> interface. Like the original Rx, its intention is to enable easy composition of asynchronous operations and event/data streams.

ObjectMapper

ObjectMapper is a framework written in Swift that makes it easy for you to convert your model objects (classes and structs) to and from JSON.

Refactorator

Refactorator is an Xcode plugin for refactoring Swift & now Objective-C code. It will rename public or internal vars, functions, enums etc. For private and local entities use Xcode’s existing “Edit All in Scope” functionality.

Spring

Spring is a library to simplify iOS animations in Swift. It has grown into a full-blown animation library that supports every View, Transitions, Loading Animation and a lot more.

iUI

iUI is a framework consisting of a JavaScript library, CSS, and images for developing advanced mobile webapps.

In Conclusion

That’s it! The ten (10) best Obj-C/Swift (iOS) tools, plugins, and libraries to help you become more productive according to Livecoding.tv engineers. What are your favorite ObjC and Swift ‘iOS’ productivity tools? What did we miss in this list that definitely needs to be added to make it complete?