When taking the first steps towards making your first (or any!) app, you don’t want to mess around with skinning custom task bars and making custom buttons, you want to be able to lay out the iPhone controls that you’re already familiar with in a way which suits your app and allows you to demonstrate to someone else – possibly a developer – how it would work. AppCooker achieves this with a level of ease rivalled by few Apps. They have a lot of the iPhone’s controls (with more coming!!) And you can quickly and easily arrange them till your heart’s content! You can describe how screens navigate between each other using links and almost all properties of all controls can be modified.
App Cooker is an extremely useful tool for someone with an idea who isn’t professionally involved in creating software – or inclined to be so. In fact, so much so that I think that the perfect revenue model for these guys would be for them to make the app free and at the end just have a massive submit button, which will then quote the user a price for having it, made and in the store. 🙂 Okay, so there’s some complexity in there which we’re ignoring, but if you could make it work it would be amazing.
AppCooker has some other features besides the wire-framing tool but frankly, I understand that this is a play at ‘everything you need to design an app’, but the other functionality is a mixture of unnecessary and confusingly over-themed.
The expenses / profit calculator could be useful but I think I’d find it difficult to recommend to anyone using this over a Google spreadsheet and I couldn’t find any way of exporting the data if you step up beyond just making an app and need to generate P&L.
The way I would think about the value proposition is £19.40 for the wire framing and £0.59 for the rest, then it feels great!
Overall, this is a fantastic concept, even better implementation and is genuinely a useful application if you would like to design an App! I look forward to later versions of the app with the rest of the iPhone controls and am interested to see what they do with the rest of the tools to make them more practically useful.
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