Many developers have problems with designing their apps due to the lack of knowledge on how to transform their graphics into valid and working Objective C code. Because of this, many semi-professional designers either choose iOS-preset interface elements or they design just badly colored, two-dimensional fields. This obviously leads to many incoherent, poorly designed apps no one wants to buy. If you are not able to do better but still want to offer something in the App Store, this is the only way to do so - even if it’s a very malicious one for pixel lovers.
To give developers an edge, Pixelcut is now offering PaintCode for Mac. It combines detailed and full-featured vector creation with a powerful code compiler to immediately convert your created UI elements into valid Objective-C code, which is ready for copy & paste implementation in Xcode. When starting a new design, you can set for which device and canvas, in which code language and which canvas the app has to compile your design. Then you can start creating, for instance, a button with the various shapes the app offers (traingle, star, rectangle and much more), and optionally apply new colors or even gradients to it using the upcoming selection inspector. With every change and addition you make to your graphics, the code will instantly update in the small editor panel in the bottom of the app window. To see the immense amount of time the tool can save, have a look at the screenshot below. I tried the demo version of PaintCode and started out with a simple oval area, with a light outer and inner shadow applied (usually used to make an object seem plastic). Just these two small UI features need more than 40 lines of standard iOS ObjC code. For more complex (and better-looking) elements, this app is a outstanding time saver.
PaintCode is a tool every busy UI designer and app developer should consider buying. It has an immense feature set and works fast and reliable. You can check out and investigate the Xcode files of various design examples created and coded with PaintCode on the app’s website; there’s also a demo video of the app. If PaintCode seems useful to you then, get it on the Mac App Store for a quite expensive, but still justified, $99.99.
