Apple and Google app stores are racing toward a million apps each. But, that hasn’t stopped them from innovating and enhancing their development tools to make the app creation easier and quicker. They have invested in visual design interfaces to allow developers to design their apps more efficiently and bring them to marketplaces much faster. Both enterprise and consumer app developers have heavily benefitted from these design paradigms.
Apple provides an interface builder called ‘Storyboard’ as part of XCode while Google has ‘XML Layout’. The most important goal of these visual design interfaces is to make the developer’s life easier. At AnyPresence we believe that mobile development solutions should complement the efforts made by Apple and Google. Our mission has been to expedite the app development process within enterprises using all available tools.
We asked ourselves one simple question: How can we provide a solution where native app developers can leverage all the benefits of the AnyPresence platform and also retain the power of using these visual design enhancements from Apple and Google? A few days ago, we announced availability of the industry’s first platform to auto-generate iOS Storyboard and Android XML layout as part of the app development process within AnyPresence. Check out the official press release.
Here is how this process works: App developers start by using AnyPresence platform to define the backend of their app, from the data sources, to the objects, to the optional mobile services. Along with the backend, they can also assemble a data-driven user interface that is bound to the objects in the backend, using common UI patterns and widgets including forms, lists, button, charts, and maps. The AnyPresence platform then generates native, non-proprietary application code, which includes programmatically generated Storyboard metadata for iOS apps and XML layout for Android apps.
Developers now have a fully-working prototype app, with backend connectivity, and unrestricted flexibility to edit the source code outside AnyPresence. They can use this capability to significantly reduce the time of building a fully working native app, and then make advanced UI tweaks directly within the native development tool of their choice. Voilà – best of both worlds!
Here are snapshots of auto-magically generated Storyboard and XML Layout of a simple Hello World app I was working on:
