Sunday 13 November 2011

Essential Mac apps for Corona development

Saw an excellent forum entry on Corona about apps to aid development. These are consolidated as:

Corona Project Manager - $74.99
Corona Project Manager is for anyone who develops mobile apps using Corona® SDK. Drag in a project folder, click Launch, and it's up and running in the simulator. It manages all the projects and assets (source code files, graphics, audio files, etc.) that go into your app so you can quickly switch from one to another, swap out assets, and just generally have a smoother workflow.

TextMate - $55
TextMate is my favorite text editor! BBEdit is good too, just a little pricey

Corona SDK bundle for TextMate - FREE
This TextMate bundle was recently released and makes development SO much quicker!

Pixelmator - $59
A great image editing alternative to Photoshop, with lots of filters, layer support, web export, and much more!

Sketch - $40
A vector drawing alternative to Adobe Illustrator. This developer (Pieter Omvlee) is awesome! He released a new version today 1.0.5 which had a few reported bugs. He released 1.0.6 within an hour that fixed them all!!! That's what I call amazing support! I highly recommend this app to anyone developing graphics, icons, splash screens, etc for apps - especially games. Most, if not all, of these apps have free trials.

Zwoptex - $24.95
Sprite sheet creator. This developer has been working very hard to make the app compatible with Corona Game Edition.

filewrangler - $15
This app is very helpful for renaming batches of files - which you'll be doing often if you create a Corona app with dynamic image resolution.

ImageOptim - FREE
This is a nice image compressor - works well on PNGs if you disable OptiPNG and AdvPNG. You can also use jonbeebe's "posterize" trick in Pixelmator or Photoshop.

iShowU HD - $29.95
iShowU HD is a very slick screencast app that can be used for making demo reels for your app or game.

ColorSchemer Studio 2 - $49.99
A nice app to build color combinations with a lot of tools to compare, compliment, and contrast colors. They even have a community driven color scheme gallery to download free color schemes into the app.

WireTap Studio - $69
Not the cheapest or the best audio editor but this one lets you select any input (even specific application audio) on your Mac to record audio. It also has a basic built-in editor.

gedit - FREE
A text editor

Daz Studio - $230+
Easy way to download 3D artwork and render it as 2D images for apps

Are there any others that you are using in your game development?

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