Top iOS tools libraries for 2021
Xcode is improving year after year, but is still lacking some key elements compared to other IDEs. The dev community is nonetheless active and is creating tools on various scopes to help us all on our journey.
Here is a list of some of those tools that you may not know but that are quite useful.
Periphery
Having a large codebase can imply part of dead code. Locating it is not an easy task and can be the main reason to give up on its removal.
Periphery is a complex tool but easy to use. By building a graph representation of your project, it will identify all the elements that are defined but not used. You can now declare your code as dead and remove it.
Xiblint
Linters are well known tools to analyze your code and that in most of development languages. Objective-C or Swift are not exempt, but your project is generally not only made of code. Storyboard and xib files are often used in their simplest form and miss important informations like ones linked to accessibility.
Xiblint is a great tool to help you stop forgetting it.
Poes
Testing push notifications hasn’t been the easiest thing to do during your app development. Fortunately, support for simulators has been added quite recently. Xcode 11.4 made it possible, using the already existing command simctl. Its flaw is the need to use an APNs file and its format.
The cool thing is that Poes removes this need and does it for you with a simple command line.
Gedatsu
Not everyone is a fan of AutoLayout, but everyone knows the pain to decrypt its errors in the console logs. Gedatsu provides you human readable logs that will make your debugging way faster.
DevCleaner
Developing iOS apps consumes a lot of your free disk space. Unfortunately, Xcode LOVES to cache data but forget to clear it later. Those data can come from your app builds or from iOS versions you don’t need anymore.
DevCleaner will facilitate their removal instead of you doing it manually.
Examples for those tools are available on my Github.
