PsiToolkit

Update: This project is unmaintained and will not be developed further. Use it at your own risk. If it explodes and kills your cat, don't blame me.

This project was started as my personal collection of various useful ObjC methods - extensions to native Cocoa, UIKit and Foundation classes, which I used in several projects, and I figured it's better to keep them in one place. I've been adding more and more things to it over time and it grew into a kind of micro framework. I hope someone else will finds this stuff useful too.

Usage

Add the whole directory to your Xcode project. You don't need to add the stuff on the root level, except PsiToolkit.h.

The code is divided into several "modules" which can be enabled or disabled. Only the "Base" one is required, the rest is optional. You don't have to add the modules which you don't use into Xcode, though if you do, they will just be ignored (the compiler will skip them during build).

To import and configure PsiToolkit, add an import line to your Prefix.pch file, and before that line declare which modules you'd like to import (Cocoa and UIKit obviously shouldn't be used together):

#define PSITOOLKIT_ENABLE_COCOA
#define PSITOOLKIT_ENABLE_MODELS
#define PSITOOLKIT_ENABLE_NETWORK
#define PSITOOLKIT_ENABLE_SECURITY
#define PSITOOLKIT_ENABLE_UIKIT
#import "PsiToolkit.h"

The configuration lines have to be added before the import, otherwise they won't matter.

Another thing you can configure this way is the choice of a JSON parsing library, if you need one. 4 libraries are supported: YAJL, JSON Framework, TouchJSON and JSONKit (see also a blog post that compares them).

To use one of them, add one of these lines to the prefix file:

#define PSITOOLKIT_USE_YAJL
#define PSITOOLKIT_USE_JSON_FRAMEWORK
#define PSITOOLKIT_USE_TOUCHJSON
#define PSITOOLKIT_USE_JSONKIT

If you don't add any of these, methods related to JSON parsing will be unavailable.

Dependencies

For using some methods of PSModel, a JSON parser is required. The Network module requires ASIHTTPRequest library.

The Security module uses either SDKeychain by Steven Degutis or SFHFKeychainUtils by Buzz Andersen (both are already bundled inside PsiToolkit). Both of these require adding Security.framework (provided in the SDK) to the project (see Add -> Existing Frameworks...).

Available classes

Base

PSConstants - useful constants, e.g. for data size units, time units, and HTTP methods and status codes
PSFoundationExtensions - categories adding methods to Foundation classes like NSString, NSArray, NSDate
PSIntArray - an array that stores integers (actual integers, not NSNumbers)
PSMacros - useful macros, e.g. for creating Foundation objects or sending notifications

Cocoa

PSCocoaExtensions - categories adding useful methods to Cocoa classes

Models

PSAccount - class representing user accounts, provides methods for loading and saving data to settings and Keychain. Requires Security module.
PSModel - base class for implementing models built from JSON data. Some methods require a JSON library.

Network

Requires ASIHTTPRequest.

PSConnector - base class for building "server connectors" that send requests to a remote server and parse responses. Some methods require Models module and/or a JSON library.
PSPathBuilder - a tool for building URLs with parameters
PSRequest - represents a single request to a remote server
PSResponse - represents a response to a request
PSRestRouter - generates URLs for some helper methods in PSConnector. Requires Models module.

Security

Requires Security.framework.

PSSecurityExtensions - methods for setting and reading passwords from the Keychain (both on MacOSX and iOS)

UIKit

PSUIKitExtensions - categories adding useful methods to UIKit classes

mackuba/PsiToolkit