Programming is just one part of an iOS developer experience. Quite often we need to create app screenshots, mockups, generate icons that are compliant with xcode’s image assets and even clean xcode’s notorious cache that gobbles our pc’s memory space. The tools below provide free easy solution for some of these problems and more.
AppMockup
Best tool for App Store Screenshots
If you are a solo or freelance iOS developer sometimes you are required to wear multiple hats to deliver on a product’s vision. Creating App Store screenshots is one of those tasks. AppMockUp Studio is a free online design tool that helps with that. It helps you create compelling and professional looking screenshots for the App Store. No account required. It is fast, free and honestly better than almost all the other paid alternatives i have tried.
AppMockup Pricing: Free
Icon Set Creator
Best tool for creating your App’s icon
If you have ever tried to create an app’s icon set that’s compliant with xcode image asset specs, you know how painful and ridiculous it can be. I really like this tool, what it does is simple, but it makes life much easier.
With Icon Set Creator all that’s required to create an icon is just simply drag an image onto it, and it will automatically make an app icon set that’s compliant with xcode’s iOS, macOS and other apple’s platform specs.
Icon Set Creator Pricing: Free
DevCleaner for Xcode
Great tool for cleaning xcode’s developer caches
Xcode is a notorious memory hug that steals tens of gigabytes of your computer’s storage in it’s ~/Library/Developer folder. Most of these cached files and symbols are not reclaimed over time and consumes a large amount of your storage, which is especially important if you have relatively small SSD drive.
If you want to reclaim gigabytes of your storage that Xcode has stolen from you - this tool is for you!
DevCleaner for Xcode Pricing: Free
QuickType.io
Free tool for streamlining the process of parsing JSON data. It can generate swift model objects from JSON data
As iOS developers, we often have to parse JSON data and this process can be tedious and boring due to the fact that we have to write a bunch of swift model objects just to safely decode our JSON. Well QuickType.io is a powerful tool that can help us automate this process and make it more efficient.
With QuickType.io, we can generate our Swift models or other programming language models from JSON data with just a few clicks. This can save us a significant amount of time and effort.
QuickType.io Pricing: Free
Objc2Swift.js
Decent free tool for converting objective C to swift
As iOS developers, we often face the challenge of converting Objective-C code to Swift. Fortunately, there are tools available to help us with this task. One such tool is Objc2Swift.js, a free JavaScript converter that can convert Objective-C code to Swift.
While some of the paid automated options may be more advanced, Objc2Swift.js is a useful and cost-effective solution. It may be rudimentary in comparison, but the fact that it is free is hard to beat. With this tool, iOS developers can convert their Objective-C code to Swift without having to spend a lot of time and resources on manual conversions.
Note: If your goal is to totally migrate an entire objective c codebase to swift, i would advice you go with other paid and more automated options. But for simple file conversions, this does a decent job as long as you’re familiar with earlier versions of swift.
Objc2Swift.js Pricing: Free
Rotato
Fantastic tool for creating a 3D animation of your app
Until recently, creating a 3D animation of your app required learning how to use programs such as Cinema 4D or After Effects. Programs that are difficult to get used to, that requires high-performing hardware, and have a high learning curve. If you’re like me, you would rather spend your time developing your apps. That’s why I’m happy with Rotato. This tool allows you to seamlessly create amazing 3D animations for mockups, demos, videos and marketing purposes etc.
Note: Unlike the other tools, rotato is a paid app. But there is a free version that’s still absolutely delivers great value.
Rotato Pricing: Free Version Available but there is paid premium as well
Bye ✌️
Thank you for reading, i hope you found the article useful.