No such module 'TTTabBarItem' using CocoaPods - ios

Question

I'm trying to extend TTTabBar. When I had the lib in my project, it worked fine but I wanted to keep it as a pod (for maintenance and version management) and extend it as needed.
Since then, I can't import it without errors. Other similar answers (and there is a lot!) didn't help.
My Podfile:
source 'https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs.git'
platform :ios, '8.0'
use_frameworks!
target 'Octoly' do
pod 'RealmSwift', '~> 0.98'
pod 'Mixpanel', '~> 2.9'
pod 'SwiftHTTP', '~> 1.0'
pod 'TTTabBar', '~> 1.1'
end
Here is the code where I try to import it and you also can see that I opened the workspace and TTTabBar is installed:
I have tried lots of things:
Clean / Rebuild
Remove pods and reinstall
Close / Reopen XCode
Add the frameworks to my building settings
Combinations of the previous steps
Here is the Binaries linked where I added TTTabBar:
It is good to know that it works fine for RealmSwift and import TTTabBar works but then it doesn't know what TTTabBarItem is in class TabBarItem: TTTabBarItem {}.
Notice that I've started iOS development 2 days ago so there might be obvious things that I am missing.

Answer 1

You are facing those issues because you are not supposed to import TTTabBarItem (the class you intend to use), but the whole library, in your case import TTTabBar. I think the linker is clever enough to only include the referenced files you use in your code.
So again, use import TTTabBar instead.
More importantly, the developer of the library made a fundamental mistake:
If you take a look at the source files, you can see this:
class TTTabBar: UIViewController { // rest of the code... }
He specified no public access modifier, which basically means that you cannot access it outside of the internal target of the library (you can basically only reference it within the source project/target itself, which is useless to any developer integrating this library).
You have an option though:
Due to the size of the library, you can just go ahead and copy the files into your project (any modifications you would add would always be overwritten if you just used the pod on subsequent pod install calls, so your initial intent to modify the library also doesn't seem to be a viable option).

Answer 2

The problem is actually in the TTTabBar module itself. The TTTabBar and TTTabBarItem classes and its method are not declared as public. So you don't get those classes in your app. The creator of that module should have made those classes and functions public
The solution is to change the local copy if your TTTabBar* files to include public access specifier in the classes and some of its methods and build your project.
E.g.
public class TTTabBar: UIViewController and public class TTTabBarItem: UIButton
You also have to mark 3 other methods as public as well.
In TTTabBar file viewDidLoad
in TTTabBarItem drawRect and init?