Some useful libraries for iOS development.

2012-08-19 Updated 2025-12-31 · 8c48a1b

One of the great things about developing for iOS in Objective-C is the amount of freely available MIT licensed libraries out there .While some just make your life easier so that you don't have to re-invent the wheel,others like FMDB are almost essential to certain functionality.Here is a list of some libraries I just cant live without. screenshot FMDB One of the major issues I stumbled over when working with sqlite in iOS was that the database connection seemed to keep breaking,causing tons of unneeded frustration. I then learned of the Flying Meat Database wrapper (I know, coolest name ever) which fixed this problem and now I will never create a database based app without it. Pull to Refresh Pulling down on a UITableView to refresh is a nice touch ,but its also something you don't want to spend too much time on. This library makes it simple for you , all you have to do is make your tableViewController a sub-class of PullRefreshTableViewController.h and then implement the -(void)refresh method. Put all your refresh code in that method and end it off with [self stopLoading]; Simple! image NSData+base64 For those who need to convert their NSData ,such as images to a base 64 string for use with web services,this is pretty much the alternative to writing it yourself. This guy writes a ton more libraries that I just haven't looked at, though the GPL licenses for the ones that I did look at deterred me from looking at the rest  (if you use a GPL library ,your software must be licensed under GPL as well). XMLReader This library is absolutely awesome if you are connecting to a SOAP based web service, no need to parse XML, just send the string through this baby and out pops an NSArray/NSDictionary structure that is way easier to work with in Objective-C. There are tons more libraries hanging around the internet, so stay sharp,you never know when you may come across a gem.

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