What's a great open source calendar view for iOS? I'm mainly looking to use it as a date picker, so it doesn't have to have all the bells and whistles. A customizable appearance is more important.
1 Answer
Old post. but here goes.
The problem is that Apple does not provide a calendar view out of the box. So you can either :
- Create one your self:
If you decide to take the hard road, you will need an awesome tutorial. One can be found here. It explains how to create a calendar in Swift using a UICollectionView. This approach is good because you use less memory than if you were using a UIViewController.
- Use one already developed
If you decide to take this option, then there are many calendars built for iOS that you can find on github. The big problem will be converting it to the look and feel of your app. I was stuck at this problem for a while and I dreaded creating the thing myself because of time constraints. So after going through the best ones on github, I have found a top of the line library that towers above the rest. Below is what I have found. I will also list the top calendars I have compared it with on github.
Winner: JTAppleCalendar. You can find it on Cocoapods on this link or you can get it on Github at this link. This little library is unlike the others in that its configurability is up to the developer. yay You can check out some of the calendars that its users have developed for it here. And you can see its setup tutorials here. It also as a demo that you can download right from github.
Btw, If you have never heard of cocoapods, then invest 10 mins of your time to learn about it. It is the easiest way to integrate 3rd party libraries to your iOS projects.
Other top calendars I have compared it with:
Why did these fail to compare? Well as the developer of this calendar stated in the documentation:
Other calendar projects on Github try to cram every feature into their control, hoping it will meet the programmer's requirements.
This is an incorrect way to build controls.
It leaves the developer with an extremely wide selection of (in many cases non-conventional)
features that he has to sift through in order to configure the calendar.
Also, no matter how wide the feature selection, the developer is always
restricted to a predefined configuration-set shipped with the calendarControl.
Do you see Apple building their UITableView by guessing what they think you want the UITableView to look like? No. So neither should we.
