Where To Go From Here?
Your range slider is now fully functional and ready to use within your own applications! You can download the complete project right here.
However, one of the key benefits of creating generic custom controls is that you can share them across projects — and share them with other developers.
Is your control ready for prime time?
Not just yet. Here are a few other points to consider before sharing your custom controls:
Documentation – Every developer’s favorite job! :] While you might like to think your code is beautifully crafted and self-documenting, other developers will no doubt disagree. A good practice is to provide public API documentation, at a minimum, for all publicly shared code. This means documenting all public classes and properties.
For example, your RangeSlider needs documentation to explain what it is — a slider which is defined by four properties: minimumValue, maximumValue, lowerValue, and upperValue — and what it does — allows a user to visually define a range of numbers.
Robustness – What happens if you set the upperValue to a value greater than the maximumValue? Surely you would never do that yourself – that would be silly, wouldn’t it? But you can guarantee that someone eventually will! You need to ensure that the control state always remains valid — despite what some silly coder tries to do to it.
API Design – The previous point about robustness touches on a much broader topic — API design. Creating a flexible, intuitive and robust API will ensure that your control can be widely used, as well as wildly popular.
API design is a topic of great depth, and one which is out of scope for this tutorial. If you are interested, Matt Gemmell’s 25 rules of API design comes highly recommended.
There are a number of places to start sharing your controls with the world. Here are few suggestions of places to start:
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GitHub – GitHub has become one of the most popular places to share open source projects. There are already numerous custom controls for iOS on GitHub. What’s great about GitHub is that it allows people to easily access your code and potentially collaborate by forking your code for other controls, or to raise issues on your existing controls.
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CocoaPods – To allow people to easily add your control to their projects, you can share it via CocoaPods, which is a dependency manager for iOS and OSX projects.
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Cocoa Controls – This site provides a directory of both commercial and open source controls. Many of the open source controls covered by Cocoa Controls are hosted on GitHub, and it’s a great way of promoting your creation.
Hopefully you’ve had fun creating this range slider control, and perhaps you have been inspired to create a custom control of your own. If you do, please share it in the comments thread for this article — we’d love to see your creations!
