For Rapid iOS Development.

A collection of our go-to tools

Through the years our team has put together a go-to list of tools and resources for building apps. Below are a list of those that our iOS Development team deems as essential for building mobile apps quickly and effectively.

Realm Database

Realm

Long gone are the days of CoreData and NSUserDefaults. A Realm database is easy to implement into new and existing apps, supports migrations, seeding, object linking and more. It's also a cross platform solution with SDK's for Java, Objective-C, Swift, and Javascript.

In addition to an awesome stand alone database, in early 2017 Realm released their "Mobile Platform", which provides automatic syncing of Realm Databases across devices. It's also self hosted, which means you can use the same database across mobile and web and not be concerned about yet another provider's Cloud security.

Visit Realm

CocoaPods Library Control

CocoaPods

Just as Composer brings external library control to PHP or Bower brings the same to Javascript, CocoaPods is the dependency manager for Objective-C and Swift. The first "stable" release didn't make it out until May of 2016, but it's been a necessity to our workflow for well before that.

Visit CocoaPods

PaintCode Vector Tool

PaintCode

This amazing tool turns vector drawings imported from Sketch, AI, SVG, PSD, EPS, and even PDF into semantic Objective C or Swift code. Unlike the other resources listed above, this tool costs a one time $99.00, but it's well worth it. Not only does it simplify the designer / developer workflow, it decreasing the file size of your apps, and allowing to you animate and scale your image assets in vector form. Giving you extreme flexibility.

PaintCode App

Bitrise Automation

BitRise

Bitrise is a powerful automation tool that streamlines the building of Android, iOS, and Xamarin apps. It can for example, pull your code from GitHub, archive it, deploy via Fabric, upload to the App Store, and send you a Slack message when it’s completed. When you build as many apps as we do, the CPU and RAM on your own machine can become a concerning hurdle. This great service is the solution for that. Did I mention they have an API? They offer a free tier and several others for power users.

Visit Bitrise