SSToolkit 2.0 — Hi, I’m Sam

SSToolkit 2.0 — Hi, I’m Sam

Hi, I’m Sam

This is my blog. I also have a website thing.

SSToolkit 2.0

Posted on March 13, 2014

Today, I released SSToolkit 2.0. The first commit was September 9, 2009, but there are classes in SSToolkit that even predate that. Some of the code in there I wrote before the App Store even came out. This junk is old.

After some major frustration last year with CocoaPods, I decided to remove support for CocoaPods from SSToolkit. The maintainers of CocoaPods couldn’t write a podspec that actually worked for SSToolkit and I was tired of fighting with it. I really like CocoaPods, but there have been plenty of bumps along the way.

I decided to break SSToolkit into several libraries. This came with the support from the CocoaPods folks, so I got going about 8 months ago.

Today, I woke up to someone and the CocoaPods creator going back and forth about SSToolkit and what needed to be done. I decided to just release SSToolkit version 2.0 which replaces the all of the previous stuff.

This doesn’t come lightly. SSToolkit is my most popular piece of open source software. Currently there are 2,258 stars and 433 forks. It’s among the top Objective-C libraries on GitHub. I know a ton of people use it and I realize this will break a lot of things.

Hopefully it isn’t too painful to move to all of the new libraries. Honestly, I don’t think people should actually use SSToolkit. Just using parts of it you need is a much better approach.

Here’s everything that’s included in SSToolkit 2.0.0:

• SAMAddressBar — Clone of Safari's address bar from iOS 6.
• SAMBadgeView — Simple badge view.
• SAMGradientView — Easy gradients in UIKit.
• SAMHUDView — Kinda okay HUD.
• SAMLabel — UILabel with vertical alignment and text insets.
• SAMLoadingView — Simple loading view.
• SAMCircleProgressView — Determinate, circular progress view.
• SAMRateLimit — Simple utility for only executing code every so often.
• SAMTextField — Handy UITextField additions like insetting text.
• SAMTextView — Add a placeholder to UITextView.
• SAMWebView — Push UIWebView to its limits.
• SAMCategories — A collection of useful Foundation and UIKit categories.

Several of these libraries have had big improvements since their abstraction from SSToolkit.

Onward.