Here comes our popular “Applications we use – our favorite tools” blog update for 2022.
An overview of tools we like and frequently use (an update to our 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 articles). These tools are essential in our daily development process and in spreading our ideas.

Development

We use a couple of development tools to develop our apps and our upcoming software tools for app developers and publishers like our App Store Manager or our Android Release Notes Creator.

  • Gitlab – offers a broad set of functionalities and allows us to store and maintain our code.
    So we intensively use the issue tracker for planning our development tasks and maintaining our product backlog, usage of the CI/CD functionalities for our automated build, test, and deployment into various stages
  • TexturePacker – create optimized sprite sheets for your apps with this excellent tool
  • Visual Studio Code – we changed our IDE to an offline editing
  • Google Firebase – as a development platform for our tools
  • Pencil – we create our mock-ups with this graphical tool
  • Draw.io – to create mock-ups and charts as well as diagrams online
  • Android Studio – we develop apps once in a while
  • Flutter – whenever we create apps – Flutter is the open-source UI software development kit of our choice (new)

Design tools

For creating our artwork, we sometimes use just pen and paper and then a scanner. But if we are digital, we have some favorite applications.

  • Inkscape – most of our artwork is vector-based. So our main and beloved tool for creating our graphics is Inkscape. Because in our opinion, it is the best free and open-source vector graphics, editor
  • XnView – is an easy and fast image viewer with great batch tool features. Therefore we often use it to transform, resize or convert multiple images automatically
  • Flashback Recorder – To capture screens and edit them for a release on our Youtube channel
  • Movavi Video Editor – for Mac – helps us to cut clips, tutorials, and videos
  • Aseprite – a very intuitive sprite and pixel art tool
  • LaunchMatic – generating and translating thousands of app screenshots with a few clicks
  • Canva – to create marketing campaign material (new)
  • Desygner – a graphic design tool for non-designers with easy-to-use UI and thousands of free templates to start with (new)

Ressources

We prefer to create infographics and so on ourselves. But sometimes we access publicly available resources:

  • icons8.com – a perfect source for many things: icons, illustrations, photos, music, and design tools
  • Fontawesome – the icons we like
  • Pexels – amazing free stock photos

Communication

We are a distributed team and work most of the time remotely. Therefore a good communication tool is a must.

  • Slack – is our leading communication platform. For this reason, we use it to share ideas, to keep decisions, and message
  • Whereby – we use Whereby’s easy-to-use video meetings frequently
  • Hubspot – our CRM, contact center, and email marketing tool
  • Discord – for more team communication, without 45 minutes time frames (new)
  • Signal – for mobile and desktop communication (new)

Helper tools

Our development and marketing often use these small applications for different tasks.

  • TinyPNG – compressing images and being aware of the quality. This makes applications and websites smaller and faster
  • Littera – creating text and font sheets for our apps. Upload your font and create image maps
  • BeFunky Collage Maker – creating lovely collages for our tweets and social media activities
  • EZGIF.com – we create our animated GIFs with this little tool and do some video resizing
  • Convert CSV – do some CSVs need conversion? We use this online tool
  • Deepl – our favorite translation tool for almost any correspondence
  • Convert Case – useful for converting texts from right to left and left to right
  • Material Color Design Palette – define the colors of your material applications
  • Total Commander – the all-time classic for large file operations (new)
  • Grammarly – to improve writing skills (new)
  • Wifi FTP Server – to access our mobiles and move large numbers of files (new)

Marketing channels

There are many options and channels to market your app ideas. We primarily use the following:

  • Twitter – follow us on Twitter. Mainly tech things
  • Facebook – we share our articles and blog posts there
  • Instagram – find pictures of our marketing campaigns on Insta
  • Pinterest – not used very often at the moment
  • YouTube – we published already many videos and tutorials on YoutTube
  • LinkedIn – find our business there
  • Medium – sometimes we publish articles there (new)

Applications we use

Our “Applications we use” blog series is updated once a year.
Of course, we do not receive any compensation for adding an application or service to our list.
To clarify, these are simply tools that we like to use often.

Feel free to follow us somewhere or give us your feedback about the tools you know and use and would recommend for us.

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