What's in my iOS toolbox? | Hacker News Reader

What's in my iOS toolbox?

edsancha.com

159 pointskumarski35 comments

I'd recommend http://www.objc.io/ under Continuous Learning. http://www.mobile-patterns.com/ is also good for design/inspiration, curated by a former Foursquare designer

I love how deep objc.io dives. They'll present long essays on topics which normally get glossed over in a sentence or two. Particularly useful are their thoughts on the state of objective c design patterns (quite a volatile topic since the release of iOS).

I absolutely loved the views and controls articles, something so basic but so usefully in-depth. I acquired many of the facts they mention through trial, error, and WWDC sessions over the years... my coworkers would think I was talking out my ass when I'd bring up the kind of internal plumbing it mentions (e.g., subviews over drawRect or image views being ridiculously fast) and it's nice to have as a resource.

I forgot http://www.objc.io/ in my first draft... quickly added it later. Mobile patterns seems similar to pttrns and looks good to... Thanks !

Yeees, the objc.io guys are awesome.

There is my day gone... Thanks for the great resource!

http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/ AppCode, the IDE that is an extension of my brain. Wonderful inspection abilities at breakpoints. Superlative refactoring and completion. And so very much more.

http://injectionforxcode.com Injection for XCode and AppCode for hot code injection so that I launch the simulator once and code interactively over many, many changes.

https://github.com/robertwijas/UISS UISS so I can interactively configure appearance proxies.

Slowly but surely, I will live like in Smalltalk.

Have you tried Reveal or SparkInspector?

http://revealapp.com

http://sparkinspector.com

Just a little. The next time I am brought onto an existing project, I will use one of them. For my own code, I generally know how I have built things. I have my own debugging categories to dump view and controller hierarchies.

To make "code visible" as I use an app, I wrote a category that logs -viewDidLoad -viewDidAppear and anything else one wants: https://github.com/mediumbear/LoggingInterceptor Very handy, never ask "what is this controller called again?", just look in the console.

I rely on AppCode's tools often, but I can't get past the icky-slow-Java-app feeling for everyday use. Do you just put up with it or is there a "Don't feel slow" checkbox I'm missing?

That is interesting, I feel AppCode it is faster than XCode on my machine: 11" Air with 8 megs. I generally have XCode, AppCode and IDEA running and it is all smooth.

Do you have an SSD? I have a 27" iMac that I use as an external screen, because the HDD makes me crazy.

I feel way faster using appcode - their refactoring is so powerful.

For me it is that I can trust the refactoring implicitly, and undo works everywhere just in case.

After XCode did some very creative refactoring one too many times, I simply lost trust in it. Perhaps things have improved in newer versions, but there is still too much missing: completions that are really intelligent, as well as intelligent templates.

With AppCode, it's become a game of how few keystrokes I can type to have it complete. It feels like 10% must of the time. The guesses it makes are great and what I would use most of the time, almost magical.

This is a great list! Here are some tools that I have also found useful that I don't see on the list:

Dash[1] - Quickly check documentation (like, really quickly)

objc.io[2] - Great reading on iOS and OS X APIs

HockeyApp[3] - Service similar to Testflight

https://itunes.apple.com/app/dash-docs-snippets/id458034879?..., http://www.objc.io/, http://hockeyapp.net/

I've been meeting to get Dash after hearing about it on a recent podcast (can't remember which one though). Assuming since it's in your "toolbox" you enjoy using it?

Dash's search speed puts Xcode to shame. It makes development much, much quicker for me.

Dash is still good but not quite as essential with Xcode 5 which is MUCH faster than Xcode 4 for documentation searching.

Dash also has all the other docs you need (C/C++ standard libraries, SQLite and Flask/Postgres/etc. for the server side and even man pages).

And in two days you will not be allowed to submit apps built with Xcode < 5 to AppStore.

Dash is wonderful. If you use Alfred, there's a fantastic workflow you can get set up as well.

Very useful post for my daily iOS development.

I would add objc.io as a source of continuous learning.

Pixelmator instead of Photoshop for me.

Pixelmator and Sketch are a fantastic combination to replace almost everything I'd ever do with Adobe CS.

Sketch is also so much easier to get nice results out of than Illustrator.

I love Pixelmator, but its biggest shortcoming is the complete lack of palette management, especially if you pick up and move between different monitor setups frequently. They need to snap to each other and the sides. They just end up everywhere, including on top of each other. I can never find the ones I need because they're always piling up and changing sizes and locations.

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

I must say that the list wasn't a full list of resources but the ones that I normally use. There are a lot of useful tools and resources most of the tasks can be done by several apps. The point was giving other people a starting point and getting feedback in new apps.

For example, I've been using PS and I've never liked GIMP ... not sure why. But hearing suggestions, like Sketch and Pixelmator, is motivating to start using them.

Another point is price (not value). There're a lot of tools that I find great but expensive for a single developer. I don't say that I wouldn't use them but... the post was getting super long and it wouldn't reflect what I normally use/check on a daily/weekly basis.

Thanks again!

I would like to add PaintCode and XcodeColors. PaintCode: It's really expensive but it's like a live tutorial on low level view drawing. XCodeColors: Used in conjunction with heavily modded LumberJack loggers is like logging heaven.

I bought the latest Macheist Nanobundle and got PaintCode for $20.

There's a really great list here too: http://benscheirman.com/2013/08/the-ios-developers-toolbelt/

Link to http://capptivate.com is broken. Any idea if the site has moved to a different domain ?

It's actually a .co http://capptivate.co

Thanks

I would also like to add Appium from Sauce Labs[1] as a wonderful way to automate testing on multiple mobile OS-types (and versions) and they are also working on providing cloud-accessible physical devices for testing soon too.

[1] https://saucelabs.com/features

Pretty good list. I'd add rvictl, Wireshark, and mitmproxy to that list. And just started using Xcode Server/Bots and PonyDebugger, too.

What I'd really like to see is a list for Android. Either Android tooling is terrible in comparison or I'm missing something.

For avoiding vendor lock-in with analytics tools, drip email, and getting your raw usage back out as logs or webhooks, you might check out Segment.io -- you can even change analytics tools on the fly without resubmitting to the App Store.

Great list! I would toss on http://cocoapods.org/ for dependency and library management as well!

Some links are broken. capptivate.com, [Glyphish]gly...

But good post! Thanks

Most important tool missing - Xamarin.

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