Are you an iOS developer? Maybe you’re starting to learn how to build apps for the iPhone or iPad and you want some help? Maybe you’ve already published some apps and you want to take your current and future projects to the next level with a killer UI and advanced visualizations? Tired of undocumented, unsupported, feature-poor, buggy Open Source Cocoa controls?

NucliOS is your answer.

Whether you build your iOS apps in Objective C with Xcode or AppCode, or using C# with Xamarin.iOS (aka MonoTouch), NucliOS has the native iOS controls every Apple developer needs. Coming this April in just a few short weeks, NucliOS 13.1 will bring you more controls, more features, more productivity.

Why Does Infragistics Care About iOS Development?

iOS was initially introduced as a platform for consumer devices. As more and more businesses are adopting Bring Your Own Device programs, iPhones and iPads are starting to dominate within the enterprise. With this shift comes a need for corporate applications designed & built for iPhones and especially iPads.

I get to see this shift in technical interest first hand at conferences. Last Fall I started doing a new conference talk titled “iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)” at HDC in Omaha. The talk was an immediate hit. .NET developers are hungry for iOS knowledge. It got scheduled again for Prairie DevCon in Regina, VSLive in Orlando, Dallas Day of .NET, and I’m doing it again this week at VSLive in Vegas, and in May at Prairie DevCon in Winnipeg and VSLive in Chicago. You can even catch the webinar version I recently recorded here.

The Microsoft .NET ecosystem is rich in partners, component vendors and ISVs. The Apple world? Not so much. It’s a world dominated by Open Source developers. A world where the enterprise can’t get the premium components, full documentation, quick start samples and top-notch developer support they expect and need. This is where Infragistics comes into play.

For over two decades, enterprise developers have turned to Infragistics controls for help in building the best in state of the art user interfaces for the Windows platforms and the Web. For the first time in its history, Infragistics introduced in 2012 a suite of native iOS controls named NucliOS, continuing our tradition of excellence and bringing over 20 years of UI controls design experience to Apple iOS developers.

Our controls are designed and engineered with versatility, extensibility, scalability and forward-compatibility in mind. They are fully supported, fully documented, and ship with dozens of samples to get developers up to speed quickly.

The initial release of NucliOS was just a first step for Infragistics in a long journey within the Apple world. Infragistics is committed to the iOS platform, and Apple developers can expect new features and controls from us in 2013 and beyond. As iPhones and iPads keep evolving, users expect richer experiences. The iTunes App Store has more than 750,000 apps and the competition is fierce. Developers need to push the envelope. NucliOS helps developers create more advanced applications in less time, increasing their productivity and lowering their costs and time to market.

What’s New for iOS Developers in NucliOS 13.1?

NucliOS provides the core controls developers need to build high performance, highly interactive iPad & iPhone applications with stunning visuals. The initial NucliOS 2012 release included the two most requested types of controls regardless of developer platform:

• an advanced Data & Layout Grid
• a set of powerful & versatile Data Charts

In this new 13.1 release, Infragistics is introducing even more new features in these already powerful controls.

Our iOS Grid now supports:

• Fixed Columns
• Column Resizing & Reordering
• Inserting & Deleting Columns
• Infinite Scrolling
• Filtering Attributes
• New Slide Row Options
• Better Theming

Our iOS Data Charts control now supports 17 additional chart types, for a total of 39 chart types and more features, striving for full parity with its XAML cousin.

Release 13.1 of NucliOS also sees the introduction of brand new controls, including:

• a new Pie Chart control you can easily bind to your data
• a powerful and fully configurable light weight high performance Radial Gauge control
• the new Rich-Text Label, allowing you to easily display fully formatted text in your apps

We’re also extending the reach of NucliOS on the international scene, with a new localized version for the Japanese market. Japanese iOS developers now benefit from fully translated & localized NucliOS product, samples, help and documentation.

New iOS Control – Pie Chart

Pie Charts are a staple of virtually every report and data visualization dashboard. Thanks to the new Pie Chart control for iOS, you can now easily add simple or exploded pie charts in your iPad and iPhone applications. Connect the Pie Chart to your data with the Data Class Helper, set a customizable threshold for inclusion in the "Other" category, and configure text labels and images that can be displayed within or outside the pie in a manner that avoids overlapping. Users can tap or drill down to view underlying data, explode out a section of the pie, and get information via tooltips using touch gestures.

Key Pie Chart Features

• Pie Chart Data Binding & Data Source Helper – To get data into the Pie Chart, we’ve implemented a Helper class that will make it easier to bind data, similarly to the Data Chart & Grid Data Source Helper classes. Developers provide an interface that implements a protocol that the view knows about, and the protocol methods provide the information that the IG Pie Chart needs to display data.
• Slice Selection & Slice Explosion – Selected slices use selectedBrush and selectedOutline properties to color the pie slice with distinct colors. Exploded slices are disconnected and drawn at a distance from the origin. This distance is controlled via the explodedRadius property. Slices can be selected or exploded either programmatically or using touch gestures.
• Touch Gestures – The NucliOS Pie Chart is optimized for touch interactions on iOS devices like the iPhone and the iPad. The Pie Chart supports tap, long press (aka “tap & hold”) and rotate gestures.
• “Others” Category – The underlying data for any Pie Chart can often contains small value items, too numerous to display in a significant manner via separate pie slices. For such occasions, the “Others” category allows for automatic aggregation of several data values into a single slice. Use the othersCategoryThreshold to separate which values get their own slice, and which values will get rolled under “Others”.
• Styling & Themes – The look & feel of the NucliOS Pie Chart is completely customizable, allowing you to style it to your app design and your brand. Simple properties are exposed to easily style the outlines and brush fill colors of the pie slices, allowing you to use solid colors as well as gradients. Alternatively you can use chart themes to give your pie charts and other charts a consistent and color-coordinated look and feel. Simply set the theme property to one of the predefined themes or create your own.

New iOS Control – Radial Gauge

Make your data visualizations and dashboards more engaging with radial gauges for iOS that show your key performance indicators (KPI) with rich style and interactivity. Create highly configurable, round or semi-round dials and gauges for your information dashboard with the look and feel of a clock, industrial control panel, automotive dashboard or aircraft cockpit. The NucliOS Radial Gauge is powerful yet simple to use. Just drop it in your view and you’re ready to go with the default look & feel. Simply tweak the configuration options to meet whatever custom look you desire in your application.

The iOS Radial Gauge is compatible with the Ignite UI (i.e. HTML5 & jQuery) and XAML (i.e. WPF & Silverlight) versions of the same Radial Gauge, both visually and in features, that Infragistics is introducing on multiple platforms, helping you create a consistent look & feel across platforms.

Key iOS Radial Gauge Features

• Fully Configurable Radial Scale– The Radial Gauge control lets you control the Start and End positions of the scale, major and minor tick marks, labels, color ranges and sweep direction. You can create full 360 degree scales, or half circular gauges with 180 degree scales, 90 degrees, 45 degrees or any custom value you want.
• Fully Configurable Needle– The Radial Gauge control lets you control various attributes of the needle, including the needle color, length, point, base, and cap. These easy configuration options allow you to create over 50 needle types without the need for any external graphics. The following needle shapes are built-in:
  • None
  • Rectangle
  • Triangle
  • Needle
  • Trapezoid
  • Rectangle With Bulb
  • Triangle With Bulb
  • Needle With Bulb
  • Trapezoid With Bulb

• Fully Configurable Backing– The Radial Gauge backing can be configured to display any custom image. You can also control the transparency level of the backing, colors, shape around the gauge edges (fitted or circular), oversweep and corner radius.
• Motion Framework Animations Support– The Radial Gauge control supports animated transitions between configuration states. The control gradually animates as it redraws changes to the needle, needle position, scale range, color range and more. You can control the speed of the animations by setting the desired Transition Duration.

New iOS Control – Rich-Text Label

The IGLabel is a Rich Text label that works similarly to the generic UILabel and applies styles to text in a similar fashion that is done when using attributed strings. It is based on Core Text to boost performance and functionality over the generic UILabel.

Key Rich-Text Label Features

• Rich Text Attributes– Attributes allow you to adjust text characteristics within the IGLabel, including the font type, bold, italic, and underline characters, text color, kern spacing, text stroke color and width, interaction of text through tap, and more.
• Paragraph and Text Styling - Paragraph and text styling options allow the developer to customize the paragraph formatting and layout of the label’s content. This includes word wrapping, clipping, truncating with automatic insertion of ellipsis glyphs, alignment to the left, center, right or justified, margins, paragraph spacing, indentation and more.
• Overflow Indicator - The overflow indicator is used to display a custom view in a preset location for when the text overflows the label’s bounds. The most common scenario is to add an overflow indicator at the bottom right of the label when the text is too large to be displayed in the allotted space in the view.
• Text Variables– Text variables are used to allow for dynamic text using custom variables to automatically fill in the necessary values when a label is updated.
• RegEx– Use Regular Expressions to identify and style text within the IGLabel.

New Features – GridView

The NucliOS Grid is more than your typical tabular grid: it’s a powerful control that can be used either as a data-focused grid for both consumer and business applications, or as a versatile layout tool that allows developers to create compelling user experiences on the iPhone, but especially on the iPad. With this control, developers get the ability to style & template the grid to look like almost anything.

The NucliOS Grid can also be used as a single column list when other important elements need to be shown on the iPad, similarly to the native iOS Mail client, or when the screen real estate is precious, such as is the case in iPhone applications.

Release 13.1 of NucliOS builds on this strong foundation and adds even more features to our native iOS Grid, making it the most ubiquitous UI control for all iPad and iPhone applications.

New GridView Features

• Slide Row Options– The NucliOS grid now supports new built-in behaviors to respond to a horizontal sliding gesture (i.e. swipe left / right). Simply set the swipeRowAction property to one of the following options:
  • Swipe left or right and a Delete button is displayed (already available in release 2012)
  • Swipe left or right and a row will slide to the right
  • Swipe left or right and a row will slide to the left
  • Swipe left and the row will slide to the left, swipe right and the row will slide to the right
  • No action

• Column Reordering – Column reordering allows users to rearrange the position of visible columns within their data source helper, by using simple drag and drop techniques. It is also possible to trigger a column move programmatically, without any manual dragging gesture.
• Inserting / Deleting Columns – Inserting and deleting columns is very similar to inserting and deleting rows and cells. Methods are now provided for inserting and deleting normal columns using a data source helper.
• Fixed Columns – The NucliOS Grid control recognizes two distinct column types, normal and fixed. A normal column is any column that is not pinned in place, while the fixed column feature allow for one or more columns to be frozen / pinned to stay in view on either the left or right side of the grid, while allowing horizontal scrolling of the other columns. New methods are available to specify how many columns to freeze on the left or right of the grid.
• Column Resizing – The grid now supports resizing a column by setting the columnResizing property, thus allowing column resizing directly in the UI. You can also toggle column resizing on and off.
• Infinite Scrolling – Infinite scrolling allows the grid to scroll the contents of the grid continuously, without the need to scroll back to the top or left most cell. Infinite scrolling is a popular UI paradigm that allows for a more fluid navigation. You can choose to enable infinite scrolling horizontally, vertically, both or none at all.

• Filtering Attributes – Filter attributes allow you to apply a customized visual appearance to text matching a filtered text string. This makes it easy for users to find specific keywords or phrases using highlights within a grid that contains a lot of text data, just like you would with a colored marker on paper. You can control the color of the text highlight to insure that the filtered text stands out regardless of your app or brand colors.
• Grid Theming – From photo albums and slide shows to movie collections and sales reports, the NucliOS grid can be styled to look like almost anything. As an iOS developer, you benefit from complete styling flexibility within the grid, allowing you to emulate first party iOS apps, match your own brand, or design any custom look & feel desired. Theming is now even easier. New to this release, you can create your styles in one place and toggle between multiple styles very easily. You can create your own themes, which consist of multiple properties that control various styling attributes such as font, background color, text color and more.

New Features – ChartView

The initial release of NucliOS introduced a powerful iOS control that lets you render charts with hundreds of thousands of data points that are capable of millisecond updates, sparing nothing to achieve blazing speed. Support for the Motion Framework™ within the Data Chart control allows developers to build highly engaging visualizations and provide smooth playback of changes in data over time, giving life to your data through fluid animations.

New Chart Series

Release 13.1 of NucliOS introduces 17 new chart types in the ChartView control, enabling you to easily implement heavy-duty data visualization and analysis on large volumes of data with high performance in iPad and iPhone applications.

The NucliOS ChartView control now supports a total of 39 chart types, including the following new chart series introduced in release 13.1:

• Stacked Chart Category Series– ChartView now supports a whole range of stacked series for every day scenarios.
  • Stacked Area Series
  • Stacked Bar Series
  • Stacked Column Series
  • Stacked Line Series
  • Stacked Spline Area Series
  • Stacked Spline Series
  • Stacked 100 Area Series
  • Stacked 100 Bar Series
  • Stacked 100 Column Series
  • Stacked 100 Line Series
  • Stacked 100 Spline Area Series
  • Stacked 100 Spline Series

• Scientific Charts– From wind patterns to performance metrics, Polar & Radial series can expose new insights in many scientific data sets. The new scientific charts supported include:
  • Polar Spline Area Series
  • Polar Spline Series
  • Radial Area Series

• Chart Financial Series & Financial Indicators– Financial charting scenarios were already supported for both Candlestick and OHLC bar charts. Release 13.1 now introduces 29 new financial indicators, including:
  • Bollinger Band Overlay
  • Bollinger Band Width Indicator
  • Chaikin Oscillator Indicator
  • Chaikin Volatility Indicator
  • Commodity Channel Index Indicator
  • Detrended Price Oscillator Indicator
  • Ease Of Movement Indicator
  • Fast Stochastic Oscillator Indicator
  • Force Index Indicator
  • Full Stochastic Oscillator Indicator
  • Market Facilitation Index Indicator
  • Mass Index Indicator
  • Median Price Indicator
  • Money Flow Index Indicator
  • Moving Average Convergence Divergence Indicator
  • Negative Volume Index Indicator
  • On Balance Volume Indicator
  • Percentage Price Oscillator Indicator
  • Percentage Volume Oscillator Indicator
  • Positive Volume Index Indicator
  • Price Channel Overlay
  • Rate of Change and Momentum Indicator
  • Relative Strength Index Indicator
  • Slow Stochastic Oscillator Indicator
  • Standard Deviation Indicator
  • StochRSI Indicator
  • TRIX Indicator
  • Ultimate Oscillator Indicator
  • Weighted Close Indicator
  • Williams Percent Range Indicator

• Chart Scatter Series: Also known as Scatter Plots or scattergraph, you can benefit from this type of mathematical diagram in your iOS apps using Cartesian coordinates to display values for two variables for a set of data. You can also enable trend lines to facilitate data analysis. The new scatter types supported include:
  • Scatter Line Series
  • Scatter Spline Series

The iOS data chart control is designed for modularity using chart series. Multiple chart series are supported to create composite charts for better data comparisons on the same surface.

New Chart Features

Value Overlay – A Value Overlay uses the value property to bind a numeric value to display as a line superimposed over other types of series in order to highlight important values such as a data set’s mean, median, mode etc…. The Value Overlay uses either the horizontal or the vertical axis, as a reference, when bound to an IGNumericXAxis and IGNumericYAxis respectively, as a line segment emanating from the center of the chart when bound to an IGNumericAngleAxis, or a circle when bound to IGNumericRadiusAxis.

Support for Gradients – Enhance the look of all your charts thanks to added support for gradients. Gradients are exposed by a new brush type called IGGradientBrush, and we’re also introducing new themes specifically showcasing the use of gradients. Take a look at the various screenshots in this post to see the gradient support across many of our charts types.

Xamarin Support for iOS Development in C#

Objective C is the default language for iOS development. It’s been used to developer hundreds of thousands of applications for the iPhone and iPad. However, not all developers are ready to learn Objective C. We all have to juggle multiple technologies, languages and frameworks in our toolset. It’s perfectly normal to look for opportunities to reuse existing skills when jumping into a new environment.

iOS developers can use NucliOS controls in native iOS projects built with Objective C and Xcode, and we equally provide bindings to use all our controls within C# projects built with Xamarin.iOS (formerly known as MonoTouch), a product from Infragistics partner Xamarin. Xamarin’s products let developers write their apps entirely in C# and share your code on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac, using either Microsoft Visual Studio or Xamarin’s own IDE – Xamarin Studio.

Release 13.1 of NucliOS includes final Xamarin.iOS bindings for all five iOS controls, complete with API documentation, allowing you to build native iOS applications using C#.

Learning iOS Development and NucliOS

if you’re new to iOS development and/or NucliOS, here are a few quick references to help you get started:

	iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal) Webinar by Nick Landry
	Going Native: How to Develop Native iOS Applications with NucliOS 2012 Webinar by Nick Landry and Brent Schooley
	Creating iOS Applications using C# with Xamarin.iOS Webinar by Brent Schooley
	Getting Started using NUCLiOS with MonoTouch Part 1: IGChartView Technical Blog Post by Brent Schooley
	Code by SteveZ Technical Blog series by Steve Zaharuk, NucliOS Lead Product Architect, covering topics like: - Moving from C# to Objective-C - Creating a Bookshelf for your iOS App - Creating a Netflix Style iOS Grid - Using TFS on a Mac - Creating Nightly Builds of Your iOS Projects from TFS - Creating Your own iOS Framework - and much more!

Let Us Know About Your Apps

NucliOS 13.1 is an exciting release. Our grid control got better with even more data manipulation and layout features. We already had the most powerful & versatile charts on iOS, and we made them better, with more chart types, more features, covering more scenarios, regardless of your industry or app consumer target. Not stopping there, we introduced new controls with the Pie Chart, Radial Gauges and Rich-Text Label.

So when can you get this awesome release? Soon! NucliOS 13.1 is scheduled to be release in mind-April in just a few weeks. If you can’t wait to get your hands on our new iOS controls detailed above, drop me an email me at activenick@infragistics.com, tell me what control and/or feature you really want to work with now and I just may give you early access.

NucliOS is truly THE PREMIER suite of native iOS controls for professional app developers, enterprise developers, indie developers, enthusiasts and weekend warriors. We already started work on our next release coming out later this year. Expect more features in existing controls, more chart types, entirely new controls, more samples, more of everything. If there are specific controls you'd like us to prioritize, be sure to let us know on the NUCLiOS forums.

Get started today! Download the NUCLiOS trial on your Mac, fire up Xcode and take your iOS apps to the next level.  When you end up publishing cool new apps based on NucliOS, make sure to let us know, we would love to showcase your work on our website.

Take our controls for a spin on your iPhone or iPad and try the NUCLiOS Samples Browser by downloading it from the Apple App Store here. This free browser app currently showcases our grid and charts initially released in October 2012. We’ll be publishing an updated version at release time in mid-April so you can play with all the new controls and features.

We value your feedback. Make sure to post your comments, feedback and questions on the NUCLiOS forums. You can also follow @infragistics on Twitter. As the product manager for NUCLiOS, you can reach me at activenick@infragistics .com or on Twitter via @ActiveNick.