If you are an app developer, you probably know this. But for those who are new, here are a few great tools that will help you churn out an application faster. This list isn’t an exhaustive one, just some of the tools we think are great. If you’ve been using other amazing tools, feel free to leave a comment.
Design Style Guidelines
Design styles are one of the most important framework for the look and feel of any app UI/UX. Here are the Design Styles for iOS, Android and Windows Phone App Developers. These will give you the basic design rules and standards set out by different operating systems for app developers.
Opera Mobile Emulator
Opera Mobile Emulator is one of the best ways to check how your mobile website is rendering, especially in the absence of a smartphone or Internet access. The emulator supports multiple mobile profile by various manufacturers to emulate the look and feel of the mobile website on different devices. Users can also set custom resolution and pixel density for a more customised testing environment.
Adobe PhoneGap
Adobe PhoneGap is the perfect tool to develop HTML5 based native application on 7 mobile platforms, namely iOS, Android, Blackberry iOS, Windows Phone, WebOS, Symbian and Bada.
All you need to do is upload your HTML5, CSS and Javascript codes to the service and it runs it through the PhoneGap framework to compile app store ready apps, all this can be achieved without maintaining native SDKs.
AppCooker
AppCooker is a must have tool for any app developer. Using this tool you can create the initial mockup. It supports all the design feature that an app developer will want. You can create shapes with various editing options like fills, gradients, strokes, giving you complete control of the UI/UX. The tool also has cloud storage services like DropBox integrated into it making it easy to directly connect your icons and other UI designs directly into your prototyping tool. The app is available on the iPad.
Marmalade
Marmalade SDK will allow you to build cross platform applications using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. The tool also allows native application development in C/C++. iOS app developers can also develop, test and debug in a Windows system. Marmalade supports standard HTML5 and C++ libraries making it easy to reuse existing code. BlackBerry 10 developers can also use this tool to develop apps. This tool is one of the only ways to deploy OpenGL ES 2.0 based apps on Windows Phone 8.
Tokens
Tokens will help you get complete control over the process of generating and distributing free promo codes for iOS app. The tool will also help you track your codes and their redemption status. Thereby you have a better control over the limited number of codes distributed, making sure that none are wasted. It also helps by doing away with the manual redemption process and has its own step-by-step Token service. It is the perfect tool to share your newly finished app with other people.
ZipApp
ZipApp will help you develop Windows 8 apps in a zip. The platform supports making Windows 8 apps with content from Twitter, Facebook, youTube, RSS and other static content. Once you finish creating the app through the tool, it will mail you a ‘.zip’ file with the code for your applications. You can then build the application package from the code using Windows 8 SDK and Visual Studio 2012. The app will allow anyone without a programming background to make simple app for the Windows 8 platform.
Microsoft has recently launched The Windows Phone App Studio, which provides users with a similar functionality.
MobileFrame
MobileFrame is a mobile app development tools for users with no programming skills to build cross platform native or HTML5 applications for business processes. The tools allows you to add features like scanning bar codes, RFID tags and taking images. A a WYSIWYG screen designer is available for the UI/UX development.
MakeAppIcon
MakeAppIcon is a great, yet simple, tool to make icons for your applications. This web tool will help you resize and optimize your icon designs according to iOS and Android guidelines. You can just drag-n-drop or upload your design to the page and the rest is take care off by the tool. Once it generates the icon you can download the file from the site with all the icons for different configurations in it. The image formats supported include .jpg, .png and .psd. MakeAppIcon will also enhance the look in case of smaller icons which can be a bit tricky. No more time wasted in resizing and optimising your icons for various screen sizes and platforms, just use this tool and all is done in a jiffy.
Countly
Countly is an open source mobile analytics tool with real-time update functions and cross platform compatibility. This tool provides one of the best in-app analytics for app developers. The open source nature of Countly helps you get access to all the server side code required to run your your very own analytics toll on your own servers. The analytics tool will give you access to all the important stats related to sessions, number of users and time spent on app etc. This is a must have tool once you have deployed your app to the app store.
» If you are an app developer, come over for bigMobilityConf (scheduled for Aug 31st). Lot more insights on app ecosystem will be shared by Industry bigwigs.
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