As client engineers who could easily make a visible product, we all thought about making our own product at one point or another. In the company, there are UI designers, back-end engineers, operations engineers and other professional roles to solve other problems, we just need to focus on the client side of the code. However, as an independent developer, the UI, interaction design, and backend are all hands-on, especially as a beginner going from zero to one, requiring as much time and effort as the client code itself. It’s often these unfamiliar but indispensable parts that discourage indie development. In this article, I will recommend some of the best third-party technologies, platforms, and a bit of analysis. I hope I can help students in need and put my ideas into practice more conveniently.

preface

Before you go indie, think about what you want to achieve and spend your precious time in the most meaningful ways. It has been some time since I started to work full-time. The biggest insight is that time is always not enough, so I need to think more before doing something than when I was a student. Faced with the idea of “indie development,” I thought about my purpose, and there are several aspects.

  • I’m interested in interaction design and user experience. Making a product can give me an opportunity to practice.
  • Demand-driven learning is the best motivator. Always marvelibiremetheYYKitThe ultimate sliding experience in the demo, but never fully practiced.
  • Recently, I encountered the application in my workMVVM+RACModule, had to start to face this long heard but never tried architectural approach. You can test your learning results again in your own projects.

I hope that my personal project can become a testing ground for my learning achievements.

0x00 LeanCloud

The back-end stack is probably the biggest headache for most mobile engineers. I have used LAMP to build simple API projects. Compared to writing PHP code, database construction, server deployment, and so on are also very expensive. After the operation of the whole process, the harvest may be a set of interfaces without any security protection. After all, the industry is specialized, and with limited technical knowledge, it can be difficult to obtain a slightly guaranteed back-end support.

Learn about LeanCloud. It is one of the best BaaS providers in China with the slogan of providing strong back-end support for mobile development.

What can it do

LeanCloud provides very convenient structured storage services. To put it simply, we just need to clarify our data structure, and we can get the cloud data access service we want. It replaces us to do the database construction, server deployment operation and maintenance, back-end code writing and other work, but also can easily obtain security protection.

advantages

Note: both advantages and disadvantages are relative to personal development which is not professional.

  • quick

    LeanCloud provides a common user relationship model that includes not only social attributes such as user profiles and mutual followings, but also common community features such as moments of friends and news feed. Therefore, when our project only needs a simple account system, we don’t even need to pay attention to the data structure, so we can get our own back-end service.

  • convenient

    For data access, you can use either the familiar REST API or the feature-rich SDK it provides.

    Also, LeanCloud is not a traditional relational database model, but a document model. It can provide object-oriented, massive, ready-to-use storage without creating data table structures.

  • security

    For individual developers, developing a secure back-end project takes a lot of effort. LeanCloud provides ACL access control so we can get security quickly.

  • High quality

    In addition to the above, we can easily use elastic space, CDN acceleration, even instant messaging and other services.

disadvantages

Few things in the world are perfect, and technology is no different. LeanCloud’s convenience is not reflected in all aspects.

  • A more professional database background is still required

    Simple data storage scenarios don’t have a lot of optimization, but when our data relationships are more complex, Scheme optimization still exists, which LeanCloud can’t do for us.

  • Data access is cumbersome

    With traditional REST apis, clients simply “ask” for the data they want. However, when using LeanCloud to access data, we need to carry out a more tedious parameter construction. The essence of these parameters is to define the relationship between data, which may be easier to understand by using ** “use the client language to compose SQL statements” **. There is, so to speak, a sense of “handing over back-end development to the client in a language that the client is familiar with.” Hearing that startups are using LeanCloud heavily in order to save back-end developers, and that client development time is spent on cumbersome data storage, the client side is very worthy of sympathy.

    Of course, for client-side Indies where the data relationships aren’t particularly complex, the benefits of LeanCloud far outweigh these hassles.

0x01 Seven niuyun storage, and shot cloud

When storing data in the cloud, some differences need to be made between file type data and common data. Seven cattle cloud storage, and clap cloud is a professional provider of object cloud storage. You can use the parameterized way, the image and other resources in the access to automatically clipping, zooming and other operations. Qiniu is a good choice for personal projects that require cloud storage of picture resources and blog posts.

advantages

  • Provides the familiar REST API or SDK to facilitate cloud access to resources.
  • Provides a number of pre-processing capabilities for resources. For example, you can add an automatic slimming option to store images in smaller sizes. Add a zoom parameter when you get the picture, you can directly get the zoomed picture resources.

0x02 IconFont – Alibaba Vector icon Library

Most of the time, ICONS in personal projects are the part that gives us a headache. Cutting their own map, both need to learn the cost, and need a lot of operation time. At this time, might as well understand Alibaba’s iconfont. Good news for the fear of Cheto.

What can it do

Iconfont is a vector icon management and communication platform created by MUX ali Mom. Designers upload ICONS to the IconFont platform. Users can customize and download ICONS in various formats. The platform can also convert ICONS into fonts for engineers to adjust and call freely. Iconfont ICONS are processed as font files. When we use it, we only need to introduce the font files generated by ourselves, set the text font of UILabel, UIButton and other controls as iconfont, and set the text value as the corresponding icon code, so as to realize various complicated ICONS in the application.

advantages

  • I don’t need a cut. I don’t need a cut

    This advantage must be emphasized twice. Before using it, all we need to do is to select the ICONS we need from the massive content of iconFont platform, and then generate a font file containing these ICONS, import it into our own project, and then use it without cutting images by ourselves.

  • Better performance and less space

    Iconfont The font in which the icon is processed as text. There is no need to import huge resource files, and there is no need to do special processing for different resolutions, which occupies less storage space. It is not the usual way to display ICONS in pictures, better performance.

  • No distortion

    Iconfont is a vector material that does not appear distorted at different resolutions

  • Easy to unify style

    A good UI experience often requires a set of ICONS to maintain a consistent style. When selecting ICONS on the IconFont platform, you can sometimes find everything you need in one set of ICONS, which makes it very easy to maintain a uniform style.

    Below is a set of sample charts provided by Alibaba.

disadvantages

This is not a weakness. ICONS on the IconFont platform are the work of a designer, or perhaps an organization. Pay attention to copyright issues when using it. If it is a personal project for profit, pay attention to copyright issues.

Of course, you can design your own iconFont icon and upload it to the platform for everyone to use. But then the problem goes back to the beginning, where we have to make and cut our own images.

0x03 WeTest- Tencent Quality Open Platform

WeTest is a platform for quality assurance and testing services produced by Tencent. What I would like to recommend here is the iOS pre-review service provided by It, which can automate the risk points of rejection in test projects and reduce the probability of failure in Apple official review. There is free usage for individuals. In addition, WeTest also provides performance testing, compatibility testing and other services, students who need to know by themselves.

0x04 Other Common Services

In addition to the above mentioned, there are some familiar third-party services, here is a brief introduction.

  • Third-party statistical platforms, such as Umeng

    Umeng is a vendor of statistics services that help us to collect feature usage data, crash data and so on for individual projects. In addition, fabric, etc.

  • Third party application distribution hosting platform, such as Dandelion, FIR. Im

    Provides hosting and distribution services for application installation packages.

0x05 is at the end

This article is like a list of third-party services that can benefit individual developers, and you are welcome to join me in refining it. My personal email address is [email protected]. Welcome to contact me for new content.