[Development] Really Useful iOS App Developer Tools and Resources
When I first started learning how to create an app from beginning to end I found really hard to find useful sites, tools and resources to help me learn or accelerate some processes.
Hard to find useful tools
With this collection of resources I want to help you have a much easier journey towards becoming an iOS developer.
So, stop talking and let’s get started!
Here’s an example of the app I’m developing. It is a Websites Manager. Linkboard. If you want to help me improve it here is the app.
Apple Guidelines and Resources
The first site is probably the most known one: the Apple Guidelines and Resources site.
This is the official document where Apple gives you some details on design, app review, marketing criteria and even some case studies.
Human Interface Guidelines
The next one comes also from Apple and it is the Human Interface Guidelines site.
In this document and how-to guide Apple shows you some rules for designing and implementing programs on the iOS platform. This detailed, yet simple step-by-step guide is ideal for any beginner to creating iPad and iPhone applications.
Designing
This site let’s you browse through a whole bunch of color palettes that professional designers have come up with and once you found something that you like you can simply just copy and paste the hex codes of the colors into your design projects.
Flat UI Colors
In Flatuicolors you can choose a color palette you like and then it shows you colors that can look nice together.
App Icon and Store Screenshots
Make App Icon
The next one is a really useful tools for resizing the app, icon it is simply called Make App Icon.
With this tool you only need to feed it with a high quality image of your App Icon and Make App Icon will resize your icon in every format you need both for iPhone, iPad and even Apple Watch.
Mock U Phone
A tool for App Store Screenshot is MockUPhone, this tool allows you to drag and drop your screenshot designs into a phone mockup so your app looks like it’s actually in use and makes it look a lot nicer on the app stores.
Validating Your App
Mail Chimp
Building a landing page is really important, it allows you to collect emails of potential clients and allows you to even test if your app has enough traction and therefore decide whether you want to build it or not. One site that let you build a landing page is Mail Chimp, I used it many times and it gives you the possibility to collect data about your contacts.
Google Trends
Google Trends. With this site you can gauge how much interest there is in your app idea or your startup idea. Essentially what it does is that it shows you interest over time of a particular search term and you can compare search terms with each other.
The other thing that you can look at is the related topics that people search for when they’re looking for your topic. And you can look at the search terms around your search term. So for any given topic you can see what is it that people are interested to know about.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter it’s essentially a platform that allows you to showcase your idea or your project and gathering people together who are interested in funding the end result.
So the nice thing about crowdfunding as a idea of validation methodology is that it really gets to the crux of the problem.
It allows you to see if people will pay for your idea and it helps to gather information through looking at sign ups via landing pages or seeing if people will click on a buy button.
Store Maven
With Store Maven you send your traffic (people who potentially download you app) towards a page that looks identical to the app store download page and based on their conversions (whether they hit the download button or not) you can compare how different icons perform, how your app screenshots perform, how your description for form.
Promoting
In this site you get to hunt cool things or new things that have launched. It’s essentially a site where a lot of discovery happens.
So the way that it works is that when a product is hunted it is live on the front page for 24 hours and within these 24 hours you have the opportunity of being upvoted or being discussed.
Now the higher your uploads the more likely it is that you’re going to gain visibility.
