Jul 7, 2022

🔨 Seek first to understand, then to be understood

iOS Dev Tools

To build an app users love, first, we must understand how our app is used.

For us, analytics has been one of the best ways to tackle this. Mixpanel is the tool we’ve used most - check out our review below.

Another tool we like this week is Kap. Let’s face it you probably have a ton of random screen recordings on your desktop. Kap let’s you up your screen record game.

Kap - screen recorder

Kap is an open-source screen recorder

Small and easy-to-use screen recording tool with export functionality to GIF or video. Select what portion of the screen you want to record and hit the button. When done click the stop button in the toolbar and export to your desired format. Ideal to share demos with the team or debug problems together when working remote.

What we like:

Convert to GIF
Trimming content
Small, simple and a well-focused app. Solving a specific problem and being good at it

Mixpanel - analytics

Mixpanel is a powerful analytics tool

Getting insights into your users is key to creating sustainable businesses. Mixpanel is a powerful platform that allows you to track the exact behaviour of users within your apps. Query your data, display on charts and make business decisions quickly!

What we like:

3 Powerful types of reports (Insights, Funnels, Retention)
Easy to use interface
Dashboards, great to monitor daily activity
Graphs, they support a lot of graph types and if needed you can use a table. So you’ll always be able to display your data in a comprehensible manner

Pastel - Color palette app

Pastel is a colour palette app for junior developers and artists.

Ever had a project with 9 different shades of grey? Every named colours “blue-dark” / “blue-darker” / “blue-darkest”? Then we may have a tool for you!

Pastel is a simple-to-use colour tracking app for your smaller projects where you don’t have a designated UI designer. Keep track of all your colours and generate overviews to create those slick-looking apps.

What we like:

Upload a photo to auto-pick the most dominant colours
Developer-focused copy-pasting, RGB, HEX, Swift, Swift, SwiftUI
Generous free version

DevtoysMac - utility app

DevToysMac is like a Swiss army knife for developers

Here to give Boop.app a run for its money? Maybe someday! DevToys started out on Windows and became very popular amongst developers. Now it has been ported to Mac and thus the name DevToysMac.

Currently, it supports 24 actions, including JSON formatting, Lorem ipsum generator, URL encoded/decoder, teXt compare, ….

Word of caution! At the moment it is still under development, a full release hasn’t been done yet. If you’ve used it let us know what you think.

📣 Reach iOS Developers

If you build a tool that solves a developer problem, we would love to help you reach iOS developers - email [email protected]

💬 Tools from an iOS developer

Flo Writes Code is an iOS developer and makes iOS YouTube tutorials.

What’s one tool you wish you had used sooner?

Alfred for sure! It has a ton of features that aren’t related to development, but workflows for shortcuts and Snippets are super helpful.

If you could choose one tool/app to be installed on Macs in all Apple stores, which one would it be and why?

Magnet. It’s the first app that I install on a new device, as I just really miss the window management features that I got used to on my Windows machine.

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Read the full interview