My iOS Development Toolkit 2018

Sebastian Boldt
iOS App Development
4 min readMar 22, 2016

Last Update 27.02.2017

This is a curated list of iOS Development Tools, Websites, Services and Frameworks I am currently using.

Services

  • A modular plugin system for your iOS Apps called Fabric
  • Testflight is a native beta test distribution framework
  • Smooch is a great messaging SDK I am currently using to get direct feedback from my users.
  • Mobile Analytics with Mixpanel
  • I use Trello to manage my private projects
  • When working in a Team, I prefer using a tool like JIRA directly connected with the Repository in conjunction with SCRUM and Gitflow Workflow

Tools

  • Continuous Delivery made easy using Fastlane. It automatically builds, tests, signs and uploads your App to iTunes Connect, Hockey etc.. There are a lot more things to discover. Check out their Docs to learn more about all the available tools.
  • I use PAW or Postman for testing and documenting RESTful APIs
  • Find memory leaks and much more using Instruments
  • Jazzy is a command-line utility that generates documentation for Swift or Objective-C
  • If you are using GIT I can highly recommend Source Tree
  • When working with Ruby or Python I prefer using Atom over Xcode
  • A great Plugin Manager for Xcode called Alcatraz
  • Access simulators application directory from your menu bar with SimPholders
  • Cocoa Pods is a dependency management system for iOS Apps
  • Carthage is a simple, decentralized dependency manager for Cocoa
  • If you want to sniff HTTP-Request from your iDevice use Charles
  • Improve your Debugging with a collection of LLDB commands called Chisel
  • Turn drawings into code with Paint Code
  • Icons8 App provides 23,400 Free Icons through a nice desktop client
  • Pixelmator is a great low price Photoshop alternative for Mac OS
  • Power JSON Editor is a great tool to edit and overview your JSON Files
  • With Sip you can collect, organize & share your colors.
  • Kap is an open-source screen recorder built with web technology
  • I use Pocket across all my devices to store Articles for a later read.
  • CCMenu displays the build status of projects on a continuous integration server as an item in the Mac’s menu bar.

Frameworks and Libraries

  • Awesome-iOS is a curated list of useful Libraries sorted by category.
  • Networking in Objective-C made easy using AFNetworking
  • Networking in Swift made easy using Alamofire
  • PromiseKit make asynchronous operations composable, flexible objects.
  • Jelly provides custom view controller transitions with just a few lines of code
  • AudioKit is a powerful audio synthesis, processing and analysis framework
  • FBTweaks is a great way to manipulate parameters at Runtime
  • Branching approach for Git called Gitflow Workflow
  • Realm is a great Core Data alternative
  • Get strong typed, autocompleted resources like images, fonts and segues in Swift projects using R.swift
  • Visualize touches, gestures and long presses on your iPhone or iPad with COSTouchVisualizer
  • SwiftLint is a tool that enforces Swift style and conventions as errors and warnings directly inside Xcode

Miscellaneous

Blogs and Websites

  • Ray Wenderlich provides high-quality programming tutorials
  • Books, Talks and Tutorials on Objc.io
  • NSHipster is a journal of the overlooked bits in Objective-C, Swift, and Cocoa. Updated weekly.
  • Weekly bite-sized screencasts on iOS development. NSScreencast
  • A state of the art developer blog called Natasha the Robot
  • Create useful .gitignore files for your project on gitignore.io
  • Pttrns is a collection of design patterns, resources and inspiration.
  • You can find a great list of iOS Tools & Resources on iOSDev.tools
  • Cocoa Controls provides 4200 open source UI components
    for iOS and OS X.
  • You can find short and factful articles on NSHint
  • Great blog around iOS and co. khanlou

Podcasts

  • Core Intuition is a podcast about indie software development for the Mac, iOS and other Apple technologies.
  • iPhreaks provides weekly panel discussions about the ins and outs of programming for iOS.
  • Great App Development Podcast The RayWenderlich.com Podcast

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Ciao!

Sebastian Boldt

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Sebastian Boldt
iOS App Development

Creative Head, iOS Developer @ Immowelt, DJ/Producer from Hamburg. Creator of HabitBe, a weekly Habit Tracker written in SwiftUI. https://www.sebastianboldt.com