Telemachus

An NSImageView & UIImageView Asynchronous Image Loading Category

What is this?

In my project Magpie, I had a need for an asynchronous image loading library that could replace AFNetworking's UIImageView category.

Because Magpie is a Mac app as well, I wanted a single library that supported both platforms. Telemachus is a single class that serves both.

What's included

Telemachus comes with a number of components:

• The master Telemachus class, which does all the actual networking and caching.
• A UIImageView+Telemachus category, which provides a super-simple method for your UIImageView. Use it like this:

    [myImageView loadImage:@"http://your.com/loadedimage.png" withPlaceholder:[UIImage imageNamed:@"placeholder"]

• A NSImageView+Telemachus category, which does the same thing for NSImageView. Like this:

    [myImageView loadImage:@"http://your.com/loadedimage.png" withPlaceholder:[NSImage imageNamed:@"placeholder"]

• An XImage class shim to allow Telemachus to support both UIImage and NSImage from one codebase. If you don't care about UIKit support, for example, you could rip that out and make a couple tweaks to Telemachus to use your platform's class directly.

• An NSImage category, NSImage+ResizeToFill, which automatically scales NSImages to fill the provided NSImageView on OS X. This is a feature I rely on with iOS and its aspectFill contentMode, and I am including it directly because I just always need it. You can of course remove it for your needs; I may provide a flag in the Telemachus class to opt it in.

• Demo projects for iOS and OS X.

What's up with the name?

When I studied The Odyssey in university I was told that Telemachus meant "far-seeing". However, Wikipedia observes now that it means "far fighter". I like the name because it implies action over a distance, and how is that not related to seeing images flung from afar over a network? Pretty cool, right?

Can I even use this thing?

Well, I can't speak to your technical abilities, but from a licensing perspective, it's wide open. MIT License, so have at it. I will almost certainly improve it over time, but pull requests are welcome.