Long gone are the days when designers were forced to work from the office, or even indoors for that matter. With so many innovative tools being created for developers, we can now write and edit code, create graphic design prototypes, and maintain color palettes among many other functions on our cell phones and tablets. With hundreds of thousands of apps available in Apple’s App store for creativity projects alone, the iOS is a popular choice for developers.
Great for those moments outside of the office, waiting for a meeting to begin, or just passing the minutes on your mobile phone – apps for web design assist developers, freelancers, and bloggers edit their work quickly and efficiently from pretty much anywhere. Here, we have listed three of our favorite practical iOS apps we think every web developer should take a look at.
Colorstrokes HD (iPad/iPad Mini/iPhone)
This creative app lets you spruce up monochrome images by adding color to the original black and white photo. Colorstrokes invites users to input color into their photos in a number of different ways, including by uploading the photo in grayscale and going from there, or by beginning with a color photo and utilizing the grayscale feature to take away the color. For the daringly artistic, it also offers a paint feature which contains 22 colors to help manually breathe color back into the image. These are just the basic functions – Colorstrokes also has Instagram-style filters, and various adjustment options for everything from paint brush size, type, and color hue to online sharing.
Visualator (iPad/iPhone)
Brought to you by Computer Arts, Visualtor is a fun and easy to use program that allows its users to construct abstract imagery and impress their friends and colleagues. Have a go playing with shape, color, and form to produce your images and truly make them your own. It offers two main design platforms –Triangulate and Gradulate – which allow budding artists to work on the go and save their work to the device’s internal memory storage. There are many possibilities to be discovered by simply experimenting with different visual compositions, backgrounds and patterns. The finished products can then be integrated into a website’s design to add some color and life.
Wunderlist 2 (iPad)
Although there are dozens of organizational apps available that are quite useful (Evernote, for example), there is something special about Wunderlist. With over three million users worldwide, this productivity app allows you to keep all of your projects organized and up-to-date with notetaking components that feature web URL integration, auto-saving, and attaching or detaching notes to tasks. This app makes it very easy to collaborate with colleagues or even keep your personal schedule up-to-date through its incorporation of Facebook’s Open Graph utility.
While the iOS is a widely used tool in web design, be on the lookout for some of the new Microsoft and Android tablets, which are forecasted to debut dozens of practical HTML apps that function everywhere. Always do your research before deciding what is the best tablet for your web design needs so you can do your best work and stay ahead of the others – your choice might be a tablet from Samsung, Lenovo, or Sony, rather than an Apple!