Fresh Resources for Web Designers and Developers (February 2020)
It’s time again for us to share resources with our fellow web developers. In this round of the series, we’ve put together several interesting desktop applications, including one to make your desktop wallpaper more dynamic, some handy web applications, and certainly some JavaScript libraries. Without further ado, let’s see the full list.
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Check out our complete collection of hand-picked tools for designers and developers.
UsesTech
A collection of tools, gears, and software used by developers, designers, bloggers, tutors, YouTubers, and podcasters. You can sort these tools by country, programming language, and stacks. A great resource to find inspiration and recommendations for your own use.
Plash
A macOS application to set any website as your desktop wallpaper. You can display your favorite sites and feeds, random beautiful scenery photos, and even animated GIFs as the wallpaper – allowing you to have a less boring desktop.
Alpine.js
A very minimal JavaScript library to add dynamic behavior to your website. With Alpine.js, you can simply add the provided attributes such as x-data, x-init, x-bind, x-on, and x-model to the existing HTML markup on your website. Very easy. No need to set up a build tool, compiler, or transpiler. A pretty good alternative to React.js or Vue.js.
Vivus
A JavaScript library to create drawing animations for SVG. Vivus is quite straightforward to use. In fact, it provides an easy-to-use tool named Vivus Instant where you can upload SVG files to animate them.
GistPad
A Visual Studio Code extension that allows you to manage GitHub Gist. The latest release now includes a new feature called Playground, similar to CodePen.io or JSBin, so you can add HTML, CSS, JS and instantly see the result right from Visual Studio Code.
Shadows
A handy web app to generate multiple layers of shadows. You can decide how many layers to add, change the color, and the spread. It will automatically generate the CSS code to copy.
Responsive Breakpoints
As the name implies, it enables you to generate optimal responsive image sizes easily. It also provides options where you can configure the viewport size range, the minimum and maximum image size, the ratio, and generate the HTML to display the image. Yet another handy web application to ease web developers’ work.
Browserosaurus
massCode
A desktop app to manage code snippets. With this app, you can organize code snippets and examples and group them neatly in categories. massCode is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
XI-Editor
XI-Editor is a barebones framework to create a text editor with a focus on performance, reliability, and extensibility for developers. It’s been adopted to create text editors on various platforms including macOS, Linux with GTK+, and Windows.
React Contenteditable
A React.js component to create an editable area. On top of that, you can add buttons for Bold, Italic, and Hyperlink, which makes it a perfect alternative for creating a lean WYSIWYG editor. You can see the live example here.
Outline
A self-hosted Wiki web application with modern features. It’s built around modern tools like React.js, Node.js, Postgres, Redis, AWS for file storage, and the overall look feels modern. You can use it for creating team wikis, docs, meeting notes, onboarding, etc.
Crater
Crater is a web application built with PHP to manage invoices. It allows you to create invoices, send POs or estimates, and manage clients. If you’d like to manage invoices and fully control your data, using Crater may be a good alternative for you.
Directus
Directus is a Headless CMS that allows you to add custom fields for almost any type of content such as news, users, or products. You can use any language or tool of your choice to consume the content from the API, with RESTful or GraphQL. Speaking of which, check our post, Introduction to Headless CMS, for more on Headless CMS.
Craft.js
A React framework to build a feature-rich drag-and-drop page editor. It provides the underlying drag-and-drop system and handles how components are rendered, updated, and moved. Having a drag-and-drop interface provides convenience for users to do things on their own, and Craft.js may be a perfect framework to build that.
Devilbox
The Devilbox is a complete stack to run local development. It provides all the services you would ever need like Apache, Nginx, MySQL, PHP, MailHog, etc.
Magic.css
A collection of CSS rules for smooth animations. With this, adding animation to your website is as easy as adding a class name to the HTML. You can install Magic.css with NPM or Yarn and use it in combination with JavaScript or jQuery.
Kutt
A URL shortener web application. Kutt supports the use of custom domains and provides statistics out-of-the-box. It’s built with a modern stack of Node.js, Progress, and Redis, and you can host it on your own server.
