Mac|Life

Make My App 2 Pro

A tool for bringing app ideas to life, on “paper” at least

- DAVID CHARTIER

$24.99 Developer IT Top, ittop.mobi Requiremen­ts OS X 10.10 or later, 64-bit processor

Everybody gets ideas for The Next Great App. But to move on it, you need a clear, strong mockup of your vision to share with others. Make My App 2 Pro wants to be the vehicle for your vision.

Available in free (with ads) and paid versions, Make My App 2 Pro is a tool for building visual examples of your app, allowing you to tinker with how your apps might look and work at a basic level. Think of it like an app for diagrams or mindmaps along the lines of OmniGraffl­e or MindNote, but specialize­d for apps.

Make My App 2 Pro has built-in objects to represent devices like the iPhone, iPad, and even Apple Watch. Drag one to your canvas, then drag a variety of iOS objects on top to build your interface. There’s a good choice of objects – buttons, text boxes, scrollbars, tables, charts, switches, and more. However, a few essentials are missing, including tab bars (at the bottom of the likes of Tweetbot, Day One, and Safari). It would be nice to see Make My App 2 Pro get rounded out with some of these common visual building blocks. Something else we found disappoint­ing is a lack of what we call “alignment smarts.” If you’ve ever dragged things around in apps like Apple Pages, Pixelmator, OmniGraffl­e, and others, you’ll have seen the smart guides that help you align objects. Make My App 2 Pro has ways to group and resize objects to your specificat­ions, but no tools to help you polish a clean, clear layout.

Make My App 2 Pro could do with a few more of the core objects found in iOS, and a little more smarts to help polish ideas. Still, for $25 (or free, if you can put up with ads), it isn’t a bad way to get started.

THE BOTTOM LINE. A decent app mockup tool that could benefit from some fleshing out.

 ??  ?? A Make My App 2 Pro canvas with an iPhone and Watch app being created.
A Make My App 2 Pro canvas with an iPhone and Watch app being created.
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