Finding the really useful apps out there is time consuming, so I thought I’d share some of the apps that I find benefit my workflow.
LiveView for iPhone & iPad
In a previous post I mentioned syncing PNG versions of designs for viewing on devices. There’s nothing more accurate than seeing your designs on the actual devices they’re intended for. It’s relatively easy, but syncing an iPhone fifty times a day can get tedious. Cue LiveView.
It allows you to send a snap of any part of your screen directly to your iPhone or iPad over Wi-Fi. All you need to do is zoom your design to 100%, line up the LiveView Screencaster window and voila — you’re previewing your designs in half the time it took to sync. Plus, you don’t have to constantly save files and sort through them afterwards. You can then take a screenshot of your iPhone if you want to save the preview to your Camera Roll.
Unretiner
Designing for iPhone requires two sets of images — hi-res images usually indicated by ‘@2x’ in the filename for iPhone 4 and half size to suit the earlier iPhone models.
As the name suggests, if you need to quickly half the size of your 960×640 designs, Unretiner lets you batch resize using a simple UI.
CloudApp / Droplr
If I had a penny for every screenshot I shared, I wouldn’t need the clients I share them with.
CloudApp & Droplr are both very similar. You upload a file or link and get a short link copied to your clipboard that you can post in to Twitter, chat windows, email clients etc.
After using Droplr for a while (which is Free), I found the icon of the app became buggy or slow and upload times resulted in yet another excuse to check my Twitter timeline. If there’s anything I hate more than my excuses to waste time, it’s an app that gives me an excuse to waste time.
I recently started using CloudApp and I can say it’s a lot faster than Droplr. Not only can you upload larger files quickly and easily, you can choose to view the files on their web interface or by using Stratus on your iPhone. It also has a couple extra features such as auto-uploading screenshots and file view counts. You do have to pay for CloudApp and at the moment it’s $45/£27 per year.
Thanks for reading — I’ll be adding to this list as I discover more. If you know of any other timesaving apps, let me know in the comments.
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