One of the interesting things about working on a large project is the sense of influence. CocoaPods affects the iOS/Mac development community to the extent that people say Apple are worried about being beholden to us. I’m not entirely sure I agree ( but I’d love to see Apple do dependency management. )
Being an extremely active member of this community means I often get to spend time talking with others around where we’re heading and what interesting opportunities there are out there to make an impact. This post is my perspective, they are a mix of things I’d like to do but might never get round to or things I’d love to see. They tend to be web-based, because web projects are scalable and can impact everyone. Let’s take a look.
User-created lists of Pods, and official ones. I say list.cocoapods.org because I want to be able to use that data in metrics.cocoapods.org. There is an existing site whose ideas you can steal, improve, remix and redesign. The toolbox would be the place to state what the most useful UIAlertView+Blocks pod is. This is a large hole in the CocoaPods ecosystem. It’s a pretty big task, but we can help out from the CocoaPods side, and I’d help out with design.
The likely successor to Appledoc, jazzy. Contributions to this tool means helping building the future of documentation in our community. They’re just getting started too, so it’s a perfect time to start contributing. I think this is probably the most impactful tools on this list.
Get an iPhone app running embedded in an iPad simulator, make it easy for a developer to add buttons, see networking, tap views, resize the embedded app. I’ve had this idea in my head for a few months. Could probably be done with some crazy UIWindow swizzling.
I experimented with this for 3 weeks before calling it off with 1aura Brown as I was struggling to find time between Pod5, CocoaPods, a busy travel schedule and trying to actually do work. This is perfect for someone well versed in objective-c and ideally with someone they’re mentoring. The format that worked well for us was simple, we both choose a library and explained it to each other. They’d be about 20 minutes long. We’d discuss the tests, the implementation and what we thought about the library. This was inspired by a daily video series on Starcraft tactics.
A CocoaPods plugin to automatically move all installed Pods into all playground files. @import AFNetworking.
_why is a hero to me. He turned code into Art. Behind the sheer mass of work sits a man typing into a computer. For me his best piece of work is his guide to Ruby.
Books are being announced around Swift here, there & everywhere. I want a surrealist book, I want a non-computer book. I want the chance to learn a language by accident again. The fact that we can do thing in a repl greatly empowers the idea. Mix that with finding a way to import your own libraries into a Playground and suddenly you could take something like my tool for teaching objc and make something mindblowing.
Seriously. There’s a lot of things to add / improve / fix. Anyone can make their mark still.
Lots of work coming up on this, work with me & Florian on the face of CocoaPods.