Five Tools for iPhone app design

The market for iPhone apps is abundant, with over 1.2 million apps available in the app store. But, if your app has a great user experience and becomes popular, like Instragram and Disney Creativity Studio, it can be quite lucrative. While there are plenty of good ideas for new apps, it’s imperative to execute the Design and Development well to increase the chances of success. The recommended path would be to hire an experienced firm with a proven track record, such as Worry Free Labs to help with Design or Development. But if you are working on a limited budget, there are many tools and programs available that can help you Design and Visualize how the end product should function and look.

Below are five such tools that help assist you with the Design process.

1. Invision

 

Invisionapp is powerful prototyping tool that allows you to create and design a clickable prototype of a mobile or web application. This tool allows you to quickly transform your designs into beautiful, fully interactive prototypes complete with gestures, transitions & animations for web, iOS & Android. The tool helps coordinate communication and feedback and has a method of marking which screens are approved for the next phase of design or development. Worry Free Labs’ designers use this tool on a regular basis and it helps our team show clients how the app will work and look. Its also a great tool for our development team because it allows them to better plan and understand how the final product will work.

2. Balsamiq 

Balsamiq  is a tool that allows users to quickly create a wire frame mock-up of their app idea. While the functionality of an app is always important, app designers will need to ensure that their app has a great user experience. Balsamiq will help make sure you have just that before you spend precious time writing code. It also has a number of third party plugins and tools that allow for easy collaboration, making it quick and easy for teams of developers to use Balsamiq and share they wire frame mock-ups with one another.

3. Appgyver

Appgyver is another app that allows you to quickly create wire frame mock-ups of your layout and share them with your team, like Balsamiq. However, unlike Balsamiq, Appgyver also offers a program called Steroids. This is a program that allows you to develop working apps in HTML 5 rather than in Objective C, meaning it could help make the development process easier for those who already know HTML 5 and are still learning Objective C. There have been over 20,000 apps built with this program, and could help developers very much in their endeavors to release money-making apps.

4. Blueprint

Blueprint is a very useful tool to have when planning your prospective app. While the list has already contained plenty of tools to help you visualize the layout of your app, Blueprint is a useful tool for visualizing the functional side of the app. This tool helps you to make a very easy-to-follow and understand story board for your app and its functions. It uses an easy to learn drag and drop method of organizing the pages of the app, and allows for arrows and lines to placed. Blueprint helps you visualize your app and is perfect for testing the functions and navigation before having to write and revise the code.

5. Xojo

Xojo is a program that can help save a lot of time when building your app. Quite a bit different from the previous tools, Xojo is a desktop app development toolkit that allows you to use a drag and drop interface to create your app. In other words, if you’re still learning and perfecting your use of code, Xojo will let you design an app without worrying about the code yourself.