Creating apps for Android devices can test the skills of even the most advanced and experienced developer, so for an extra helping hand, there’s a number of tools available to help.
Designing
The vast majority of developers work as part of a small team, so any piece of kit that helps them make the most of their creative and user-experience skills will be welcomed with open arms. For those who use Photoshop, this tool from Bjango is ideal for pixel snapping, setting global light, colour blindness testing, viewing shadow detail, slicing layers, creating icon actions and many other uses.
As well as saving time, the software remembers best practice for the next app you create.
Charting
Whether you’re documenting the progress of your app or showcasing the final design to the client or bosses, you’ll need to make effective use of data.
If intuitive, visually-stimulating, interactive and real-time graphs are what you’re after, then ShinobiControls have recently launched the Android version of their well-known iOS software.
As well as incorporating simple, straight-from-the-box line, bar and pie charts, the tool lets developers play with axes and turn any set of standard data into a fully-interactive presentation of results.
Testing
To ensure your customers are as happy with the final product as they can be, testing your app for bugs (internally) and in front of the target market (externally) before the app hits Google Play is extremely important.
To help you gain valuable feedback from your audience, tools such as TestFlight offer checkpoints to monitor engagement, pop-ups to gather in-app feedback and physical test sessions, so that developers can watch how users interact with their prized app.
As well as looking for bugs manually, the same app also features a ‘crash reports’ function which logs errors in real-time and makes bug-hunting a whole lot easier.
