Some of you may have noticed that a lot has been going on at this blog and the mailing list. Clearly, something is afoot and while I am not ready to tell you exactly what is going on I did want to let you in on a little tidbit or two.

Mobile App Mastery

If you correspond with me via email you will notice that I am now using the address matt [at] mobileappmastery.com. This partly reflects my decision to put all my mobile development tech blogs under the umbrella brand “Mobile App Mastery”. There are a few reasons for this.

Quick Note: I am conducting a survey to see how I can make this blog a better
experience for you.

Please help me out by filling out this survey:
Click Here to take survey

The obvious reason is that I personally am interested in all mobile technology, not just iPhone OS. Right now iPhone OS is the most significant platform and the one I would encourage most people to start with because it has the audience and the business model works for many people. However, at some point in the future other mobile OSs will become more significant (looking at you Android!).

Stay tuned here at this blog and the others that I will be pointing out below for more details on Mobile App Mastery. I have some big things planned for it that will interest iPhone app developers in particular.

Mobile App Mastery Facebook Page

I have created a facebook page for this blog and all my others under the Mobile App Mastery name. This is in part due to my non-iPhone friends complaining about all the iPhone related content I post. For now, I have moved this to the Facebook page that you can see by clicking here!

Sign up for the Facebook page to add that content to your timeline. If you have friended me on facebook for iPhone stuff then I would recommend switching over to the new page otherwise you will simply be bombarded with pictures of my cats and new baby that we have on the way…

New YouTube Channel

Since I have found my previous YouTube channel named MrScopeCreep to simply be too creepy for me I have changed to (again) the Mobile App Mastery YouTube channel. Please do me a favor and subscribe if you want to have a video feed for iPhone related content.

Recap

So, clearly I have a new brand name but I am planning on doing some big things with it in the very near future that I believe you will find compelling. Be sure to not miss out by subscribing to our mailing list or one of the other feeds available on this blog!

This week I found three more articles that I thought were more helpful that most.

Combatting Ringtone App Pricing Pressure With Application Suites And Shared Pasteboards

- earlier this week I did a video on how to use UIPasteboard and this article does a good job of inspiring readers to see how UIPasteboard can help the bottom line for your app suite.

How to Create Your First iPhone Application

- this article does a good job of laying out the thought process involved in thinking out an iPhone app. It does through some design and marketing and while it doesn’t show you how to explicitly program it points you in some directions.

Developer Color Picker

- this free software solves an annoying problem when you find yourself trying to figure out the bit of code (Objective-C, hex or whatever they use in HTML) that will give you a particular color. It integrates with graphic design programs like Acorn and so it makes it simple to grab colors and then convert them to UIColor.

Here are 3 cool tools that will help you develop your iPhone app!

iPhone Application Sketch Book

The iPhone Application Sketch Book is a binder of graph paper with images of the iPhone on it. You can use it to quickly sketch your iPhone design so it is a great way to work on some prototypes and brainstorming before you pick up XCode. I received this at last week’s 360iDev and it is a neat little tool.

PhoneFinger

PhoneFinger is a nifty little Mac app that puts the image of a finger into your iPhone simulator. This is neat when you want to make a YouTube video of your app to help promote your work.

MockApp

MockApp is a simple and handy tool to help prototype your iPhone app’s user interface. This free download includes keynote and powerpoint presentations full of graphics, iPhone screens and even behavior transitions that you can use to mock up an app. This is great for prototyping and particularly when you want to hand off your iPhone project to someone else. I did a video demo of MockApp earlier this week.

NOTE: Some of these links may be “affiliate links” which means that if you click through and buy a product we may receive a commission. We do not select links or products based on their affiliate programs, but we do try to use affiliate links for things we were going to suggest already.

What Tools Do You Use To Help You With Development?

Please comment in the fields below!

Today I want to show you a new free tool I found today called “MockApp” (tagline: iPhone App design for the rest of us).

You can download MockApp as a Keynote or Powerpoint presentation. It is essentially a template full of iPhone graphics that you can copy, paste and arrange to create a quick mock-up of your iPhone app. Using a tool like this you can quickly prototype new app ideas, share them with your partners and then hand off your design to a programmer to implement it.

In this video I show you this new tool, demonstrate some of the graphics included and show how you can use it to prototype you next app.

If you want to try this out, download the software at MockApp. Remember to help them out by linking to them or giving them a mention on Twitter.

How Do You Prototype Your Apps?

Comment below!