I have, at the Charlotte Autofair in 2009. However, it has the ability to forever change the way you prototype and build your apps, and it will pay for itself nearly immediately once you start taking advantage of its features.I wonder how many of us have actually seen a car with it's original Nightmist paint. Bottom lineĪt $100, plus an additional $20 if you want the ability to import PSD files, PaintCode is a fairly expensive tool. This is a relatively minor point, however, and one that it should be possible for the developers to fix in a future release. For example, if it were possible to set PaintCode up so that it could use class properties instead of locally-defined variables, it would be easier to incorporate the code in an existing class. My only real complaint is that I would have liked a bit more control over the way the parameters are handled. Each parametrized aspect of your document is rendered so that you can easily manipulate the values, making it very easy to iterate through different versions of your code without having to continuously make changes manually. Taking a peek at the source if you are so inclined, the quality of the code that the app outputs is quite good individual lines are indented well and generously commented where appropriate. With PaintCode, it took me around 15 minutes from beginning to end. This very basic test isn’t going to win any design award, but it’s a good example of something that would be very hard to do using bitmaps, both because of the animations and because of the requirement that the images scale without becoming pixellated. Very simple app that animates several shapes, morphing one into the next every two seconds. Having been burnt by automated code generation tools before, I wanted to check the quality of PaintCode’s output firsthand, so I wrote a You can also choose whether to support Apple’s ARC memory management technology, target specific versions of iOS, and even determine whether your code uses a normal or flipped coordinate system. There are a few options available: you can choose which operating system to export to, as well as your pick of either Objective-C or Microsoft’s C#. PaintCode’s export functionality takes whatever you have created and converts it into code that you can use in your apps. The use of parametrized vector images makes it easy to code effects that would be hard to achieve using bitmaps or traditional vector files. This is very handy when you want, say, the middle of a button to stretch horizontally, while keeping the sides a fixed size. You can also set up a shape so that it scales up and down from its initial dimensions in a predictable way, replicating the edge-inset resizing functionality offered by Cocoa classes like NSImage and UIImage. I couldn’t see designers switching away from the tools they’re already familiar with, and it seemed unlikely that a developer would want to deal with adding yet another piece of software to their toolchain only for the sake of gaining a rudimentary ability to manipulate graphic documents.įor example, you can define colors dynamically based on an initial set of constraints, which makes changing the overall tint of an image a matter of specifying an initial starting point-a great feature for user interface elements like buttons and icons. I must confess that the decision to incorporate an editor into the app had me a little confused at the beginning. The editor’s editor The app’s editor allows you to parametrize many aspects of your illustrations, making it easier to manipulate them in code. In my tests, I was able to successfully load a wide range of vector-based graphics-including both UI elements from some of the apps I have worked on and other files that were not designed with app development in mind.Īlmost without fail, PaintCode performed admirably in one case-an old file that had been exported to SVG from Adobe Illustrator and contained an odd font-I was forced to make a few tweaks in order for the import operation to succeed, but the app was otherwise able to load up even the most complex documents I could throw at it without skipping a beat. The first of these is probably the most straightforward: the app can import either standard SVG files or documents saved using Adobe Photoshop’s PSD format, although the latter requires an additional in-app purchase ($20). PaintCode provides three primary functions: importing existing vector documents (as well as creating new ones from scratch), editing them, and exporting them to a series of source files that can be used in a development project. PaintCode can handle most of the features supported by popular file formats like SVG.
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