Our first iOS open source component

We have been thinking for a while about releasing an SDK for iOS developers. At first, the most obvious thing would be to release a wrapper for the API, but that’s something we never considered, for a few reasons:

• There are already several wrappers that are good enough, like UnsplashSwift, built on top of Alamofire.
• Chances are developers will only need to access a small subset of the API endpoints.
• Every developer likes to implement networking their own way.
• We can do better than just a wrapper.

The idea that got us more excited has been to release UI components that iOS developers can quickly add to their apps.

For our last Make Day, I wrote the first of these components, a UIImageView subclass that shows a random photo from Unsplash.

Before you can use it, you need an Unsplash API access key. Visit our Unsplash API page to register as a developer for more information.

Once you have the access key, you can use UnsplashImageView either in Interface Builder or your code, like a UIImageView. You can also use the query property if you want to display photos around a specific topic.

You can find it on Github: https://github.com/unsplash/unsplash-imageview-ios

This is the start of our iOS UI components library. We have plans for more in the future, like a photo picker.

Let us know if you use it in a project.