LinkedIn, the popular business and career networking social network, announced that it would be releasing the navigation code from its simplified iPhone app as an open source library. Sudeep Yegnashankaran, a mobile software “imagineer” for LinkedIn, made the announcement in a LinkedIn Engineering blog post. Using the library, called LIExposeController, developers can “easily create multiple, visually distinct areas in their apps for ease of flow for their users.”
LIExposeController is available now at GitHub, and works for both iPhone and iPad apps. The library is a new container view controller class similar to UINavigationController and UITabBarController. In his blog post Yegnashankaran wrote a little about what the code has to offer developers:
With this new experience, users can easily switch between different areas of the app in a visually pleasing way. We have gotten a lot of great feedback for this brand new navigation scheme, with a lot of our users calling it “easy to navigate” and “fun.” We chose this model over a standard tab bar because we wanted something more visual and tactile, giving users more context for the different areas of the app.
The code does not use the new container controller APIs in the iOS 5 SDK in order to continue support for iOS 4 devices. However, LinkedIn is encouraging developers to fork the code and submit contributions, so that functionality could soon be implemented.
Will you try out LinkedIn’s navigation system on your new app? Are you sticking to the tried-and-true tab bar navigation? Let us know in the comments section below.
