Top 5 iOS Libraries — May 2017

The best iOS libraries to try out this month.

Last month’s list broke down all our records with more than 11 000 views and hundreds of shares and recommends. 💪🏻🔥We are super grateful for your support, and all the ideas that you are sending to us. It definitely inspires us to continue doing this and promote the coolest libs out there. Hope you like our choice for May! Btw in case you are wondering why Pokemon, you’ll have to wait for the answer until the last lib :)

Did you ever find yourself playing with the bouncy scroll in the Messages app? That’s the kind of a small detail that makes your app fun to use, and it delights your users.

BouncyLayout is a UICollectionViewLayout that brings that bounciness to any collection view, whether it’s a chat app, a grid or a horizontal list!

It’s really simple to use, just instantiate a BouncyLayout object, and give the object to a collection view. The collection view will handle the rest.

Clustering pins on a map is one of these problems that you think you can solve yourself, but when you start to think about it, there are a lot of things to do. There are coordinate-maths, algorithms and UI logic. Cluster is a library that solves all of that.

All you need to do is implement a few MKMapViewDelegate methods, and you can fully customize the look of the annotations on the map!

While reading our top 5 articles, you might find yourself wanting to try out some of these libraries, but you might be too lazy to create new test projects. (We’ve all been there!)

TestDrive is a command line tool that lets you easily try out any CocoaPods pod (or multiple pods) in a playground, with a single command:

$ testdrive name-of-pod

You can also test drive pods for multiple platforms, or directly from a link to a git repository.

Material Motion is a reactive animation library based on Core Animation, that lets you create composable animations.

It is API that allows you to easily chain and compose gestures and animations together to create beautiful interactions. It’s got a bunch of ready-to-use interaction types and a lot of examples in the repository.

Okay, technically this isn’t a library, it’s an open-source project. But this was just too cool not to be included.

GIOVANNI is a Gameboy Emulator… for the Apple Watch!

Yes! You can play official Pokemon games on your apple watch. You might experience some issues, but it’s still amazing that this works!