Xcode

It's free to download this integrated development environment for Apple allowing you to create apps for iPad, iPhone and Mac. I like that you have everything you need in one place. The user interface is relatively user friendly with drag and drop technology which is great. The compiler and debugging work seamlessly. And the editor has an auto-fill feature like Google when it suggests keywords for you if you have this enabled in your account when you type them into the search bar. It does this to help you touch up and fix your code as you go which is cool. It points to errors as well, so together it's a hugely helpful feature. You can add some integrations in your app as well with a few clicks like Passbook for example, or Game Center and enable a bot which maintains your app through the entire process ongoing. And XCode allows you to actually submit the app to the App store too which is I believe is the point. I like the visual component of the editor which makes it easy to design prototypes without having to code with buttons and slider and the entire layout which you can link graphically to your source code in the editor using your mouse so that's cool. There is a secondary view which in your sidebar which helps you view the most likely connected pages to the one being worked on which you can jump to quickly and this speed up your productivity some for sure. The versioning feature is pretty good too because you can compare a bunch of different ways you may have messed up. Or find ways to refine your efforts. You can see a couple versions on one page and their respective commit logs, or go back further into your history and see who made changes so you can point the finger at them. Just kidding. But it's a useful feature to help as a constructive learning tool certainly. You can also sync to git and create repos there.

The user interface is quite well setup considering the amount of functionality in your account enabling you to take your app from start to finish and then deploy it to your customers. But consistent with Apple they tend to over do the icon based menus in my opinion. There's something to be said for minimalist approaches but combining several sets of new symbols into one's day is never a time saver. In fact, this slows things down. Sure you can hover over the item and view what tool it is but this means you're still learning and that's fine but until you've invested enough time into the tool or if you're something of a casual user this can be a burden and actually decreases your workflow greatly. Labeled menus work best and there is a way to have them appear modern in terms of style. They're self evident and that's the thing here. A combination of icon and symbol at the very least helps speed up my efficiency. I just learned another way to use my iPhone to throw away their default apps at least temporarily using a set of swipes and your button and I've had an iPhone for six years. So there's no saying what can be done with this software which is not intuitive at first glance until you know and it's nice to minimize this learning curve as an end user this means more work done.

It's a valuable free software which takes you from the very start of your app build to a complete product that is graphically complete and ready to be deployed to their app store. There really is no other way around it unless you use a third party app builder which there are tons of but not many are free. There are some great fully functional ones though which allow you to build one to three free apps and deploy them to the Apple store if you look around. And the customization is great but certainly not at the level of the XCode IDE. The flexibility within XCode itself is excellent and there's no end to the number of ways you can use it to grow your business.