Tools and Apps that make iOS Development much more easier

In my developer life I have searched tools that will help me while developing, and I have gathered the ones I like for you in this article.

First of all, I want to talk about Sherlock. In large-scale projects, the Xcode design process was not enough for us. Sherlock has accelerated our work and increased our productivity during development.

As you know, you wait for a long time to see the screen and UI components you designed in Xcode(talking about view hierarchy). It takes time to access the UI components properties even after app’s launched. With Sherlock, the screen opens very fast and you can see all the features of the UI components in a very short time. With the screen that opens, you can read the features in a meaningful way.

When you run the project in Xcode and see the screen and components, you cannot make any changes to the UI components in the runtime. You need to stop the project, make the change, build it then run it again and see how the change is reflected. Even the smallest change can take so much time (for the project that I worked for, build takes about 10–15 minutes). With Sherlock, you can make changes to the UI components in the runtime. You can see the change directly on the screen.

As you know, there are many different iPhone device models and screen resolutions. We needed to test that the UI components we developed worked correctly on all devices. So we were running the project and checking the screens on all device models. This was also a time-consuming process. Sherlock, on the other hand, allows you to see the UI components by selecting different device models in runtime. In other words, by running the application once, you can see the screen in a short time on all device models.

• Sourcetree is a free Git client for Windows and Mac. It is very useful. It makes easy to manage your repositories.
• Homebrew, is a free and open-source software package management which simplifies the installation of software on Mac.
• Swimat is an app for format your Swift code. You can see a gif from Swimat’s GitHub page.
• Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. If you’ve been a software developer for years, it’s an application you’re already familiar with. You’ve definitely heard the Postman. I generally use Postman for small native applications that I developed to improve myself, rather than using it in the project I developed at my workplace.
• Oh My ZSH is an open source and provides a way of managing your zsh configurations, themes and plugins to extend the look and functionality of your shell. “Oh My Zsh is a delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zsh configuration. It comes bundled with thousands of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes, and a few things that make you shout…”
• iTerm2 is replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm. In my opinion it is the best terminal emulator for macOS. There are several features listed on their features page. Some of the features I like are:
  • Split pane view
  • Hotkey window for instant terminal anywhere
  • Instant replay (can “rewind” your session in case you forgot to note/copy something)
  • Paste history
  • Growl support for notification when a process completes
  • Search will highlight all found words (like in Chrome and Safari)
  • Mouseless copy

Also, I want to add some web sites that you can use for iOS app development:

• Adobe Color, Color Hunt and Color Tool can be used to select colors for your iOS application.
• For fonts, you can use Google Fonts.
• For icons, IconKitchen is the best in my opinion. But you can use App Icon Generator too.

I hope you found this article useful. See you in my next post.

Full Article: Pınar Koçak @ Medium