iOS sure has come a long way…

iOS was initially introduced as a platform for consumer devices via the iPhone in 2007. The rise of the Apple App Store in 2008 quickly made the iPhone the top consumer smartphone choice for enthusiasts and knowledge workers alike. The iPad then revolutionized the tablet world in 2010 by bringing iOS to a more business friendly device, going beyond its initial positioning as a media consumption device. As more and more businesses are adopting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) 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.

For 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. Until today, Apple developers have had to resort to various open source offerings to augment the Xcode UI toolbox as this space suffered from an absence of premier component vendors. For the first time in its history, Infragistics now offers 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.

NUCLiOS provides the core controls developers need to build high performance, highly visual iPad & iPhone applications. This initial release includes the two most requested types of controls regardless of developer platform:

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

Our iOS controls are built with performance and style in mind. They’re ideal for all Apple developers, whether you build mobile apps for the general consumer market or for the enterprise. You can use NUCLiOS controls in native iOS projects built with Objective C and Xcode. NUCLiOS makes it easier, faster, and more affordable to create high performance, visually stunning native applications for iPad and iPhone devices. If you’re already an iOS developer, NUCLiOS offers a simple yet powerful API that will be familiar to you.

If you have your own in-house iOS development team, reduce the financial risk of prototyping and developing applications for iPads and iPhones. Our data class helpers make it easier for your developers to connect to your enterprise data. NUCLiOS makes it easy and cost-effective to create high performance enterprise-ready mobile application for the iOS platform.

Make the most of BYOD while saving money and reducing risk by developing and deploying high performance visually stunning applications for the world’s most ubiquitous tablet – the iPad. NUCLiOS supports powerful styling, allowing your development teams to create the look & feel within the guidelines of your company brand.

Key Features

NUCLiOS provides the most complete and productive Chart & Grid solution for iPad and iPhone developers. We are confident that you will love working with our controls and reap the benefits of our powerful control architecture:

• Native Objective C Chart control for iOS, supporting over 20 different chart types or series, markers, trend lines & financial indicators, ready to be combined for advanced composite charting
• Native Objective C Data Grid for iOS which can be used either for advanced data binding scenarios, or as a flexible user interface layouts tool. The grid featured styling and templating capabilities for maximum customization, data binding, and the ability to group, filter, sort, and more
• Simple yet powerful API that is familiar to all iOS developers
• Controls optimized for maximum performance on the Apple mobile chips
• Support for massively high volumes of data, as much as the Apple devices will allow
• Stunning visualization with themes support for the most professional-looking user interfaces

NUCLiOS goes beyond these key features. When it comes to control development on iOS tablets and smartphones, performance and battery life are critical success factors. We’ve done a lot of work in both of those areas to make sure that your users will get a premium experience when interacting with applications built with these new iOS controls.

NUCLiOS 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 you to create compelling user experiences on the iPhone, but especially on the iPad. With this control, you 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.

The key Grid features in NUCLiOS are:

Grid Data Binding & Data Source Helper – To get data into the grid, we’ve implemented a helper that will make it easier to bind arrays to the grid. Developers provide an interface that implements a protocol that the view knows about, and the protocol methods provide the information that the IG grid needs to display data.

Grid Navigation – The Grid supports multiple interactions to navigate through the data:

• Selection: Select individual rows or cells with tap gestures
• Scrolling Shortcut: Developers can benefit from API methods to programmatically scroll to a specific cell or row in an animated way.
• Shortcut Bar: Use the built-in shortcut bar similar to the one showcased in first party iOS applications to quickly jump to a section or category in your grid data (e.g. alphabetically jump to the letter you want).

Grid Interactions – The Grid is highly interactive and is designed with a touch-first approach:

• Pull-down to Refresh: Also known as “Pull to Reload”, this built-in feature allows users to refresh the data in the grid by pulling the latest data snapshot, whether it comes from a local database or a remote REST service.
• Custom Cell Gestures: The grid provides the developer with the ability to specify a custom gesture on any cell.

Grid Context Menu – Press and hold on a cell to display a custom context menu:

Grid Data Manipulation – The Grid also allows users to interact with its data in various ways:

• Row Re-ordering: Drag individual rows to charge the layout of the grid data, fluidly reordering the other rows as they are animated to their new position.
• Cell Re-ordering: Drag individual cells across the grid and watch as the other cells are reordered through smooth positioning animations.
• Row Insertion & Deletion: Select a row and insert a new one in its place, animating the others as they get shifted down. Alternatively, you can select rows for deletion by highlighting them, or swipe across a row to display a delete button as is seen in other first party iOS apps.
• Cell Insertion & Deletion: Select a cell and insert a new one in its place, animating the others as they get right & down. Alternatively, you can select cells for deletion by highlighting them individually.

Grid Data Filtering – Enable filtering on any grid column by using the filteringKey property of the IGGridViewDataSourceHelper.

Grid Data Layout – The Grid supports flexible layout options to present your data exactly the way you want it:

• Grouping and Section Column: Display an additional fixed column that contains section data.
• Sorting: Sort your grid data by one or more columns.
• Load More: You don’t need to load all your data at once. The grid can automatically fetch the next page or set of data, providing enhanced perceived performance and the ability to virtually present an unlimited number of data rows.

Grid Formatting & Styling – From photo albums and slide shows to movie collections and sales reports, the NUCLiOS grid can be styled to look like almost anything:

• Styling: Benefit from complete styling flexibility, allowing you to emulate first party iOS apps, match your own brand, or any custom look & feel desired.
• Star ( * ) Sizing on Columns: Allow the grid to automatically resize columns based on the available width leftover on screen.

NUCLiOS ChartView

Render iOS charts with hundreds of thousands of data points that are capable of millisecond updates, sparing nothing to achieve blazing speed. Enable heavy-duty iPad data visualization and analysis on large volumes of data with high performance using the more than 20 chart types included. Support for the Motion Framework™ within the Data Chart control allows you to build highly engaging visualizations and provide smooth playback of changes in data over time, giving life to your data through fluid animations.

The key Chart features in NUCLiOS are:

Chart Data Binding – Leverage the Infragistics Data Source Helper to wire-up your charts to various data sources and benefit from simplified data binding. The data source helpers are similar in concept to what is described above for the grid control. They populate the Data Chart control based on the values supplied in the array which is fed to the data helper.

Chart Navigation – Use natural multi-touch gestures for panning & zooming to to drill-down to specific data points, or zoom out to see the big picture of your data.

Chart Display – Customize your charts through several configuration options affecting the axes and legends, including:

• Multiple Axes
• Legends / Multiple Legends
• Custom Axis Scale

Chart Markers – Choose from 10 different types of markers to easily show your data points on the various chart types, including squares, triangles, circles, hexagons and more.

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

Chart Category Series – From line and bar series to spline area and waterfall series, the iOS data chart supports all your “bread & butter” charting needs for every day scenarios.

• Area Series
• Bar Series
• Column Series
• Line Series
• Point Series
• Spline Area Series
• Spline Series
• Step Area Series
• Step Line Series
• Range Area Series
• Range Column Series
• Waterfall Series

Scientific Charts – From wind patterns to performance metrics, Polar & Radial series can expose new insights in many scientific data sets.

• Polar Area Series
• Polar Line Series
• Polar Scatter Series
• Radial Column Series
• Radial Line Series
• Radial Pie Series

Chart Financial Series & Financial Indicators – Financial charting scenarios with support for both Candlestick and OHLC bar charts, and many built-in financial indicators are supported.

• Financial Price Series in Candlestick Mode
• Financial Price Series in OHLC Mode
• Financial Indicators: Average Directional Index Indicator, Absolute Volume Oscillator, Accumulation Distribution Indicator, Average True Range Indicator, Typical Price Indicator

Chart Scatter Series: Also known as Scatter Plots or scattergraphs, 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, and choose from the following types:

• Bubble Series
• Scatter Series

Chart Trend Lines – Support for multiple types of trend lines for each series on your chart. Trend lines are also compatible with the Motion Framework to provide smooth animated transitions when the data set changes. The supported trend lines include:

• Cubic Fit
• Cumulative Average
• Exponential Average
• Exponential Fit
• Linear Fit
• Logarithmic Fit
• Modified Average
• Power Law Fit
• Quadratic Fit
• Quartic Fit
• Quintic Fit
• Simple Average
• Weighted Average

Chart Theming – Use chart themes to give a chart a consistent and color coordinated look and feel. Simply set the IGChartView theme property to one of the predefined themes

Pricing, Availability & Getting Started

NUCLiOS is available now, starting at $295.00 USD for the Community Edition, which includes forum-based support. If you want the option to contact our team of support experts by phone or email, you can choose the Standard Support edition for $495.00 USD. Just like all other NetAdvantage controls by Infragistics, our NUCLiOS controls are royalty-free. You simply need to pay for each developer seat and you can write as many apps as you want.

If you write mobile applications on multiple platforms, you’re encouraged to go for MobileAdvantage, which gets you access to Infragistics’ multi-platform mobile developer tools, allowing native app development on iOS and Windows Phone, and mobile web development with HTML5, jQuery & jQuery Mobile using the new IgniteUI. If you’re an Android developer, we also just introduced our new IguanaUI Community Pack of native Android controls, absolutely free! Check them out today.

The following chart summarizes your purchase options to buy NUCLIOS:

What if you want to try the controls from an end-user point of view before you experiment with them?

Of course, you can try all these controls for free before you commit to any purchase. We are confident you will love working with NUCLiOS and all our mobile controls. You can download a free evaluation of NUCLiOS here, or the entire MobileAdvantage suite here. Additionally, you can try the NUCLiOS Samples Browser by downloading it from the Apple App Store here.

NUCLiOS Requirements

Native iOS development requires Objective C and Xcode (version 4.3 or higher) as mandated by Apple. We’ve been asked if we could provide controls to do iOS development on Windows, but this is simply not allowed by Apple both on technical and legal levels. All native iOS development must be done on a Mac computer. Our iOS controls are used within Xcode just as you would any other Cocoa controls for iOS development. Apple makes the rules, not us.

If you prefer to use C# instead of Objective C, Infragistics does provide NUCLIOS bindings for MonoTouch (see below).

NUCLiOS and MonoTouch

f you’re a .NET developer and want to build native iOS apps using C#, our friends at Xamarin offer a product called MonoTouch which allows you to write mobile apps, including iOS, entirely in C#. Infragistics is currently working on NUCLiOS bindings for MonoTouch, allowing you to use our controls in MonoTouch iOS projects. The bindings are currently in beta and they’re already included in the NUCLiOS installer. Make sure to try them out and give us your feedback in the NUCLiOS forums.

Beyond Charts & Grids

This is only the beginning of the iOS journey at Infragistics. We'll be sure to release our NUCLiOS roadmap soon enough. We are proud to introduce our first release of NUCLiOS and we can promise you there will be many more controls in 2013 and beyond. If there are specific controls you'd like us to prioritize, be sure to let us know on the NUCLiOS forums.

Contact Us

It’s time to get started! 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. We also 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.