Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Jay Cohen — The Swifty Coder

This gives you an idea of some of the main tools you should be using for mobile development.

Xcode / Android studio

Whilst there are great tools out there to program mobile apps, nothing beats native. In my opinion these other tools will always remain on the back foot, waiting to add features. If you choose these other products you may find yourself a step behind anyone who uses the free alternative.

Paintcode

Drawing complex elements on Mobile is….complex. Complex drawn on screen elements take a lot of time to produce and Paintcode eliminates all of that. This tool is amazing at drawing elements and if you’re familiar with how Sketch / Adobe XD works (See below) you already know how to use it. The tutorials on their website are a little basic but they do give perfect examples of how to achieve what it is you want. A bonus is that the code drawn (great saying) can be exported to JavaScript allowing you to add Front End skills to your resume.

There’s also a handy Sketch plugin to turn your vectors into code.

PaintCode – Turn your drawings into Objective-C or Swift drawing code

Principle

Writing chained actions and UI animations is a lengthy process and it’s unfortunate that you have to build something before you or the client actually sees it. Fortunately there are a myriad of prototyping tools popping up today and Principle is one of them. What I like about Principle the most out of all the others is how simple it is to use. It’s perfect for designers & developers alike and doesn’t have you learning another language just to use it. You can test and preview animations without writing any code, perfect for those client deadlines.

Sketch / Adobe XD

Gone are the days when Photoshop or Illustrator reigned kings of the design world for mobile. Sketch and Adobe XD are the two mainstays professionals use for designing mobile apps. Whilst Sketch is more common Adobe XD has gained a lot of ground due to its simplicity and Sketch’s new licensing policy.

Visual studio code

VSC is the latest popular addition to the text editor family and I like it. Having used pretty much all of them in the past VSC seems to have things right. It’s less clunky than others and more integrated than some. As long as you have some form of text editor at your disposal who cares which one you use 🧐.

Visual Studio Code – Code Editing. Redefined

Fastlane

Fastlane allows you to complete all your app screenshots, app uploading and submission tasks via cmd line. With one saved cmd script you can submit your app to the app stores without touching your browser, you probably will though, for at least the first two times 😉. Without turning this overview post into a lengthy one here’s more on Fastlane:

Fabric

Fabric.io dashboard

This tool is one of those that I have a hard time defining, purely on the principle that it’s just incredibly simple to use! Fabric is great for those who need to access analytics, development releases, client previews and crashlytics without going through Apple TestFlight process etc. Pretty much every statistic you’d want to view for mobile development can be accessed without multiple tabs open.

Caveat: There is some work involved for adding devices to a project list, namely around provisioning profiles on iOS.

iOS: Add the result of this go to folder finder script to your sidebar.

~/Library/MobileDevice/Provisioning Profiles

Fabric – App Development Platform for teams

Stackoverflow

Need I say more?

Tip: Take the time to read how to ask a question, in order to get help quickly it’s helpful that developers know all the facts — Common Sense

Stack Overflow – Where Developers Learn, Share, & Build Careers

Invision Studio — New kid on the block!

Invision is synonymous with creating tools to help individuals and companies give professional client access to design previews, mockups and so forth. It comes as no surprise that these guys have entered into the design creation app market as part of their development phase. Whilst I’ve only explored the beta of this tool it’s already shaping up to be a great asset to any developers toolset. Due to the community support of the mainstayers Invision Studio will need some time to allow third party integrations, nothing that we aren’t used to 🤓.

The world’s most powerful screen design tool | InVision Studio

If you enjoyed reading this, please share and give some clapps so others can find it 👏👏👏👏👏 !!!!

If you’d like to chat, reach out to me on twitter @theswiftycoder

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Developer: The ultimate mobile developer toolset for 2018 was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Developer: The ultimate mobile developer toolset for 2018

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