A little while back, we opened the conversation on open source software. We already had some small running projects, but no big stuff. We tried to create more focus by dedicating some hours in our sprints to work on open source projects. Progress is still being made on multiple projects, but here is a little show and tell of the work we did in the last couple of months.
We’re currently working towards open sourcing our iOS reddit client called Beam (more on that later). But before we take on such a big project, we wanted to open source some of its features first. We started out with Trekker.
Trekker is a wrapper to easily swap out different analytics services or to support multiple analytics services at once.
It works best with event based analytics services like Mixpanel, Amplitude, Firebase, and Answers by Crashlytics. We created Trekker because we weren't quite sure which analytics service we wanted to use, so we wanted to make it easy to implement them all and switch between services on the fly.
Interested in Trekker? Check it out on GitHub.
Tatsi is a drop-in replacement for UIImagePickerController.
Where UIImagePickerController only supports selecting 1 image at a time, Tatsi has built in support for selecting multiple images. On top of that, we integrated a camera button directly into the picker.
Interested in Tatsi? Check it out on GitHub.
Ocarina is a library to receive metadata and Open Graph information from URLs.
We were looking for a way to visualize information behind links to present and we initially used a server to receive metadata, but the server became quite crowded with calls. We built Ocarina as a solution to that problem. Fallbacks for basic HTML tags and Twitter card information make this metadata fetcher unique.
Interested in Ocarina? Check it out on GitHub.
Where Trekker, Tatsi and Ocarina are all iOS oriented oss projects, our Sketch Palette Generator is a MacOS oriented project.
Sketch Palette Generator is a plugin that allows you to output a color palette defined in JSON to Sketch.
Sharing color palettes between different Sketch files (or developers) and keeping everything and everyone in sync can be a tedious process. Sketch Palette Generator enables designers to define a color palette in a JSON file and then easily restore them in different Sketch files. JSON files also have the inherent benefit that they can be used by developers.
Interested in Sketch Palette Generator? Check it out on GitHub.
Open source software might not be new to us, but we’re pretty new to the open source mindset. We hope these small projects help us in the right direction. Let us know if you’re using one of our small tools! We’d love to see where they end up. We’re determined to release more open source software in the upcoming period.
