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.

Javascript & CSS developers looking to batch minify their files may already use the command line, but others will prefer an OS X inspired drag & drop solution. These YUI Compressor’s will gobble down your web files and spit them out with a smaller byte footprint, though the choice between these two compressors may be difficult because they’re… very similar. Quickly running through the features, we’ll leave you to decide if Delivery or Smaller will be better for your workflow.

Delivery:

Delivery is the least expensive (free), but provides the fewest options when minimizing your files. Dragging in Javascript & CSS files onto its Object Dock icon, a couple badges emerge notifying you of how many files you’re compressing, along with how much space was saved at the end of the operation. Delivery uses two compression algorithms, and decides between the one that will leave you with the smallest files. While you don’t have a choice for output (there are no preferences), Delivery places the compressed files back in their working directory with .min appended to the file names.

Smaller:

More expensive at $15, Smaller offers a GUI and allows you to compress files to a new location if you desire. As you add files to a graphical queue, you initiate the minify process (and you have the option to obfuscate Javascript as well) manually, but you don’t get a nice badge notifying you like Delivery. We like Smaller though as you can acknowledge the minimize process before committing, and has preferences that allow you to chose the resulting suffix.

Conclusion:

We suggest you give them both a try, and I have to thank our web guru Alessandro Vendruscolo for the rundown. Overall we like Delivery because it’s free and takes less actions to use, while Smaller gives you some additional options that removes the terminal barrier for web designers. You can check out Delivery and Smaller at their respective home-pages for more information.