A full stack designer's Mac Toolbox (Design/Development/efficiency)

What software does a designer with development/design/high execution skills use to help them improve their productivity? The author of this software recommendation today is an architect who likes to use self-study design skills to develop Web sites and apps to look at his toolbox.

I like to define myself as a full stack engineer with some design. In some large enterprise projects, I usually play the role of architect, and in my own personal or open source project, I became a full stack of designers. I like to use the design skills of self-study to design a website or app, and then do my own front-end and back-end. This helps me to save costs and reduce the productivity problems associated with multiple communication. But I also know that I can't have a lot of design skills like the real designers and make very good work. All I can do is improve my understanding of design by self-study, on the other hand I will carefully select the design tools to make up for my lack of design skills as much as possible.

Tool replacement speed quickly, but the right tool to choose the idea can always use, I have a set of my own tool selection strategy, mainly contains the following four points:

Concise and Modern: Select the tools designed for a single task to avoid noise at work and thus improve productivity.

Have a certain reputation and influence, and have good community support: Learning any tool software will take time or money, so choose the software or tools that are worth investing in to buy and learn.

Lightweight enough: I always need to open a lot of software at the same time to work, lightweight tools to make my system run faster, for my efficiency and development experience are very helpful.

Affordable, or you can find ... Technical craftsmen Support Genuine ^_^

Here are some of the tools I use to recommend:

　　Design class Tools

Sketch 3

Sketch is a UI design tool that fully satisfies my 4 selection criteria. Sketch only dozens of M, compared to Photoshop, it is much smaller, more importantly, it is designed for the UI design, I do not have to focus on those with my UI design has no relationship with the image processing capabilities, thus reducing the noise in the work environment. In addition, through the powerful plug-in function, I can be installed according to the need to use, which greatly improve my productivity.

Affinity Designer

Affinity Designer is a fast, fluent, and accurate vector graphic design software for Mac. You can use it as an advertisement, icon, UI, or creative concept art. An average of 5 stars in more than 2,500 app stores worldwide-and from the beginning it became the "Editorial recommendation option", it is specifically recommended as one of the 2014 best new apps and has been awarded the coveted Apple Design Award for its stunning performance and functionality at the June 2015 Apple Global Developers Conference.

Framer

There are many tools for prototyping, like Flinto,principle,orrigmi and so on, but I use very little. But if I had to recommend it, I chose Framer Studio, because it allowed me to use JavaScript code to control the action, which attracted me very much.

Paintcode

You can use Paintcode for graphic design, you can also import SVG or PSD files into Paintcode, and then it will help you convert your design into Objective-c,swift or C # code.

Hype 3 Professional

I usually use simple animations only on websites or apps, but you can use hype if you want to make a very cool animation effect on your Web page or app. He can easily design the action and export it as HTML 5 code.

Pixave 2

Designers need to continue to collect excellent design works, in order to improve their sense of design. I've been using Ember, but it's discontinued, and it doesn't support some of the latest format design files, such as Sketch,affinity Designer. Pixave 2 is a good alternative, and it supports almost all design-related file formats.

Iconjar

As a designer, you must also collect a lot of icon material. But you often find it difficult when you really need to find an icon. Iconjar can help you solve this problem. You can import your icon footage and label them, and you can quickly navigate to the icons you need through the search function provided by Iconjar.

Sip for Mac and IPhone

SIP is an excellent iOS app that can help you create swatches from photos. And you can use it anytime, anywhere on your Mac or phone to capture those beautiful colors.

　Development class Tools

Sublime Text 3

This is the IDE that I use when I develop the front-end code. I like it very much for those topics that make the code very clear, as well as the feature-rich plug-ins. With it the development of HTML, CSS, JavaScript has become a very enjoyable thing.

Eclipse

Eclipse is the back-end Java development IDE that I've been using, but it's still a lot less than the commercial IntelliJ, and it's recommended because I've been using it for one thing, because it's free.

Dash

The dash was very helpful to developers, and I was able to view technical documents such as ANGULAR,SWIFT,CSS in an offline state. This makes me able to work under bad Internet conditions and greatly improve my productivity.