I downloaded the latest version of Three20 today by Joe Hewitt. I read through some of the code and ran through the included “catalog” demo. If you’ve used the Facebook application, you’ve seen early versions of a lot of these controls.
I haven’t written any code against it yet and I’m not up to reviewing it, but I will say this: The controls seem to fully work. They’re pretty, and the code is clean.
Possibly the piece that will save me the most time going forward is the photo browser. I’m not sure yet when I’ll need this, but doing it myself would be a lot of effort at my current knowledge of Cocoa Touch:
Less visually impressive, maybe, are the buttons:
But it’s worth pointing out that in addition to having more varied styling, these are built on UIView not UIBarItem. These are going to be very useful. I’m not exaggerating when I say they’ll make it possible to write better applications.
Three20 also has some tab controls. The top one in particular has a great sideways scroll to it, and I think look and behavior adds up to great UI device, which I can use immediately:
Next, some styled views:
Not pictured:
- Three20 includes “disk” based caching for network images.
- Three20 provides easy tools for building a text representation of the application state. This will make restoring state between runs much easier.
Some of what’s in the library has been rendered unnecessary by iPhone OS 3.0, but there is enough added to make it very compelling. I plan on putting it to use soon.