As you may know, side navigation drawers (slide-in menu, side menu) are not implemented by Apple in their standard user interface library for iOS (as opposed to Google’s Android), nevertheless they are becoming more and more important. So naturally at some point you are going to find yourself in a situation where a navigation drawer for an iPhone App is a necessary step.
Of course you as an iOS app developer can always look online for some tutorials on how to implement yourself, which basically shouldn’t be a big problem, but you should ask yourself how much of your time would you like to invest in order to make the layout to work exactly how you planned in the first place.
If that is the case, here is a good tutorial to get you started:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdG6XpwwuwI
For of you who are looking for a faster, more elegant solution here are two cool options:
RESideMenu
iOS 7 style side menu with parallax effect inspired by Dribbble shots. It works both with and without storyboard.
Requirements
- Xcode 5 or higher
- Apple LLVM compiler
- iOS 6.0 or higher
- ARC
Downside
Is not the classic slide navigation drawer.
Advantage
Is A very stylish slide navigation drawer that fits exactly to the iOS 7 design concepts.
Get it from GitHub: https://github.com/romaonthego/RESideMenu
CocoaPods:
pod 'RESideMenu', '~> 4.0.4'
MMDrawerController
is a side drawer navigation container view controller designed to support the growing number of applications that leverage the side drawer paradigm. This library is designed to exclusively support side drawer navigation in a light-weight, focused approach while exposing the ability to provide custom animations for presenting and dismissing the drawer.
Downside
- Does not support container view controllers other than UINavigationController (such as UITabBarController orUISplitViewController) as the center view controller.
- Does not Support presenting the drawer above the center view controller (like the Google+ app).
Advantage
- Is the classic slide navigation drawer implemented with slide gestures to open and close
Get it from GitHub: https://github.com/mutualmobile/MMDrawerController
CocoaPods:
pod 'MMDrawerController', '~> 0.5.6'
There is also a category extension for iOS StoryBoard: https://github.com/TomSwift/MMDrawerController-Storyboard
Conclusion
This is just a small selection of side menu solutions out there and which one is the best definitely depends on the use case. What is your favorite?