InstagramKit — Instagram iOS SDK

and a better way to Instagram.

I’ve always felt the need for a more powerful Instagram client on the iPhone than Instagram’s own app. To build one, would mean compromising with posting media directly to Instagram without being redirected to the Instagram app, which has been one of the biggest deterrents for most developers toying with this idea.

Despite that, I believe there can still be a better iOS client than Instagram’s current offering. Although there have been some really good attempts to fill in the gap, there’s still room for improvement.

I still haven’t found an easy way explore media on the app and subscribe to media of my varied interests. My only option is to follow tons of users or handles and end up clogging my feed and overlooking a bunch of important pics that your ‘real’ friends post.

I have to run down my entire followers list just to check if someone follows me. (Something I do very often :/) And although I do not manage multiple Instagram handles, I’m sure a lot of folks out there do and it can get painful to relogin each time.

There’s certainly got to be a better way to do all of this.

And where are all those gorgeous little transitions with physics and blurs that iOS 7 gifted us devs with? I don’t see any of these apps making good use of it.

If you think having any of these would mean compromising with simplicity, I’d want you to take a look at two brilliant apps which I think have taken a better shot at design and user experience than Instagram. — EyeEm, the highly engaging photo discovery app and Darkrume, a gorgeous Flickr client for the iPad, being built by my friend, Nikhil. These apps sure manage to do a lot more without cluttering things up or distracting the users from the content. In fact, the subtle nuances in these apps put the content right in front to the user, gaining his undivided attention. You absolutely have to check these apps out if you haven’t already.

This was enough inspiration for me to get started with this new weekend side project of mine — A better Instagram client. It’s work in progress and while it’s gradually taking form, I decided to open source the Objective C wrapper I built around the Instagram REST API, which would be the main Interface of my app with the API.

Enter InstagramKit. This framework was built atop AFNetworking’s blocks-based architecture and additionally parses the JSON response asynchronously so there’s absolutely no processing on the main thread. It’s neat, fast and works like a charm providing an easy interface to interacting with Instagram’s model objects.

InstagramKit was trending on Github shortly after the release of the version 1 and is now making steady progress in the community, getting to version 2.1 with an upgrade to AFNetworking 2.0 and providing for seamless paginated requests.

If you can code, go ahead and fork the Github project here.

It’s a great place for you to start if you’re planning on building that killer Instagram client the world needs or you could use it just to connect your iOS App to the Instagram API.

Let me know what you think.