Apps have become the must-have tech accessory for many people, and a core part of forward-looking business marketing plans. However, not many people or small businesses have the know-how or means to create highly functional and individualized apps that are ready to be published in popular app stores.
These days more and more would-be entrepreneurs are taking the plunge by building their own apps, so it’s no shock that we’ve seen a ton of growth in two key areas:
It’s unlikely that you’d wind up on an article about how to create an app without some technical expertise, so let’s focus on the second area in this post, highlighting how some of these pieces of software can help you to design an app using tried and tested frameworks.
In these cases, it isn’t the technical side of things (such as having a bit of coding knowledge) that’s the most significant barrier to creating an app, but the prohibitive cost and time commitments. Here’s a list of apps that address these issues.
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Before you create a mobile app…
For all of you out there champing at the bit to build your brand new mobile app, the first piece of advice is this: slow down. It’s very likely that you’ve already asked yourself the following questions:
If not, ask them. And make sure you’re answering them honestly.
3d viewer app mac. Originality isn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of a great app, as long as you’re putting your own unique spin on something rather than cloning it outright, but knowing how to make an app is never going to be a useful skill for you if you proceed with an app that you can’t imagine anyone else using.
Brainstorming and market research
Maybe you’re the type of person who can organize all of their thoughts in a sterile Word document or Excel spreadsheet. Or maybe you rather associate creativity and innovation with the visual medium.
Using an app like iThoughtsX or XMind to generate mind maps can be a great way to get your thoughts down on paper and allow you to hop between threads without having to entirely abandon what you were working on previously.
XMind prioritizes the visual and sharing aspects of mind mapping; it features two presentation modes and you can assign task information directly using its Gantt Chart view.
iThoughtsX, on the other hand, is a better fit for brainstorming projects because it’s so colorful and places more emphasis on planning and goal-setting. If you really want to use it for assigning tasks, it does offer a task management format that’s a little more straightlaced too.
Pick colors for your app
Choosing how to design an app is key and, in a world dominated by flat design and minimalist app icon designs, picking the right color is a big part of that! Like that paint sampling machine at your local hardware store, Sip allows you to upload or scan images with shades to find their component colors:
If Sip doesn’t offer up all the information you’d like to have at your fingertips, then Aquarelo makes it easy to put a name (or at the very least a comprehensive color code) to a face with support for up to 36 standard formats and 46 color profiles (21 RGB, 25 CMYK).
You can also use these apps to build and manage your own custom palettes (Aquarelo, in particular, is great for this), and pull them over to Photoshop, Sketch, Illustrator, Xcode, and so on.
Prototype app design
Before you transition to the main part — coding — make sure you create a prototype or at least a few basic mockups to see what your app screens will actually look like. There’s a great app called Flinto on Setapp, which can help you build app design prototypes of any complexity.
It’s not just putting images and text blocks on a screen — Flinto comes with a dedicated Behavior Designer so that you build links across buttons, add scrolling areas, and even design animated transitions between screens. Create your prototype from scratch by combining custom elements, or import files from Sketch or Figma.
Once you’re ready with your prototype, use Flinto to export and preview your app design on iOS. This step is the most essential while it will help you see your app before it’s been created, and therefore avoid many mistakes.
Write code for your app
For a long time, Objective-C was the standard for the development of iOS apps. In 2014 Apple introduced Swift, calling it “Objective-C without the C,” as their coding language and (arguably) made life much easier for developers. Once you’ve picked up some knowledge of Swift, you’re more or less good to go!
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When you do start coding, you can make your life easier with a tool like CodeRunner. Getting started is really easy:
In addition to being great for throwing together a quick PHP backend, this app allows you to write, run and debug code in more than 25 languages (including Swift and Objective-C) and boasts useful features like IDE-level code completion.
If you’re using Swift, PHP, or HTML for a project then it might be worth taking a look at TeaCode, which comes with over 70 built-in expanders. You can also create new expanders yourself if there are functions that you’re going to be using over and over (and over…) again.
At the end of the day, anything you can do to make the process of coding a little quicker is worth doing. That’s even more true if you’re working on your app as a side project or are trying to bootstrap things. The quicker you can move, the earlier you can get the app submitted to Apple and move into beta-testing stages.
Building and extending your app
It might seem like running before you can walk, but it’s never too early to start thinking about APIs and making sure that your app can play nicely with others. If your app is popular enough, a paid or freemium API can represent an additional revenue stream that many developers leave untapped.
API development comes with plenty of potential pitfalls of its own, so it’s not something to be undertaken lightly, but an app like Paw is certainly useful for getting to grips with writing and testing parametrizable requests.
If nothing else, considering how your app could make use of existing APIs (or how building one for your own app could benefit you) is a useful exercise because it prompts you to think about features that may be missing in your offering and help to dictate your future direction as you develop an app.
App marketing and more
We’d love to be able to tell you that, once you know how to make an app, that’s the hard part over. Unfortunately, as we’re sure you’ve already figured out, that’s not the truth. Successfully releasing and marketing your new app is the next step in the process, and it’s not an easy one.
When it comes to apps, building your product is just the beginning. Whether you’re seeking steady growth or instant virality (the first may be less sexy, but it’s also more sustainable!), you have a long road ahead. However, as we’ve seen above, taking the first step on that road doesn’t have to take months or cost the earth!
But with all the apps mentioned in this article being available for a free trial on Setapp, along with over 200 other top apps, you can be all set and running towards creating your app within record time.
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This document is the starting point for learning how to create Mac apps. It contains fundamental information about the OS X environment and how your apps interact with that environment. It also contains important information about the architecture of Mac apps and tips for designing key parts of your app.
At a Glance
Cocoa is the application environment that unlocks the full power of OS X. Cocoa provides APIs, libraries, and runtimes that help you create fast, exciting apps that automatically inherit the beautiful look and feel of OS X, as well as standard behaviors users expect.
Cocoa Helps You Create Great Apps for OS X
You write apps for OS X using Cocoa, which provides a significant amount of infrastructure for your program. Fundamental design patterns are used throughout Cocoa to enable your app to interface seamlessly with subsystem frameworks, and core application objects provide key behaviors to support simplicity and extensibility in app architecture. Key parts of the Cocoa environment are designed particularly to support ease of use, one of the most important aspects of successful Mac apps. Many apps should adopt iCloud to provide a more coherent user experience by eliminating the need to synchronize data explicitly between devices.
Relevant Chapters:The Mac Application Environment, The Core App Design, and Integrating iCloud Support Into Your App
Common Behaviors Make Apps CompleteBest Graphic Design Apps Mac
During the design phase of creating your app, you need to think about how to implement certain features that users expect in well-formed Mac apps. Integrating these features into your app architecture can have an impact on the user experience: accessibility, preferences, Spotlight, services, resolution independence, fast user switching, and the Dock. Enabling your app to assume full-screen mode, taking over the entire screen, provides users with a more immersive, cinematic experience and enables them to concentrate fully on their content without distractions.
Relevant Chapters:Supporting Common App Behaviors and Implementing the Full-Screen Experience
Get It Right: Meet System and App Store Requirements
Configuring your app properly is an important part of the development process. Mac apps use a structured directory called a bundle to manage their code and resource files. And although most of the files are custom and exist to support your app, some are required by the system or the App Store and must be configured properly. The application bundle also contains the resources you need to provide to internationalize your app to support multiple languages.
Finish Your App with Performance Tuning
As you develop your app and your project code stabilizes, you can begin performance tuning. Of course, you want your app to launch and respond to the user’s commands as quickly as possible. A responsive app fits easily into the user’s workflow and gives an impression of being well crafted. You can improve the performance of your app by speeding up launch time and decreasing your app’s code footprint.
Relevant Chapter:Tuning for Performance and Responsiveness
How to Use This Document
This guide introduces you to the most important technologies that go into writing an app. In this guide you will see the whole landscape of what's needed to write one. That is, this guide shows you all the 'pieces' you need and how they fit together. There are important aspects of app design that this guide does not cover, such as user interface design. However, this guide includes many links to other documents that provide details about the technologies it introduces, as well as links to tutorials that provide a hands-on approach.
In addition, this guide emphasizes certain technologies introduced in OS X v10.7, which provide essential capabilities that set your app apart from older ones and give it remarkable ease of use, bringing some of the best features from iOS to OS X.
See Also
The following documents provide additional information about designing Mac apps, as well as more details about topics covered in this document:
Graphic Design Apps For Mac
Mac How To Uninstall App
Copyright © 2015 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Updated: 2015-03-09
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