Web designer and developers always look for useful and free web applications that can help them to achieve desired results in a certain time period. Though there are scad of premium software and applications are available which can make your work easier, but it is not possible for every designer or developer to invest and spend huge amount to buy such tools. But you don’t need to be disappointed; Internet world is full of numerous number of web applications and tools which are absolutely free and very helpful.
Every month we collect recently released applications and tools for our audience, today, We have collected 8 of the recently released tools and web applications for developers that will help you to simplify your web related tasks and keep your website a step ahead of the competition. We hope you will find a few of these Tools and Applications below handy for your development needs.
1. Maxmertkit : Frontend Framework
Maxmertkit is a fresh one that looks/feels a bit like Bootstrap but has different things to offer, it uses SASS for the CSS part and includes styles for all major stuff like grid, typography, forms, tables, buttons and lists. There are various widgets like buttons, tabs, grouped elements, badges, dropdowns, tooltips, menus and more. And, some handy JavaScript components exist for notifications, carousel, buttons, modals, etc.
Like mentioned it feels like Bootstrap on some parts but differentiates in details where one of them is the choice of the icon fonts which are Font Awesome and Zocial.
2. Docverter : Free Document Conversion API
Docverter is an open source application that combines multiple tools inside a jRuby app and works as a document conversion server. It can be installed to Heroku (the easiest option) or locally and be used with the help of an HTTP API. The application can be used for converting multiple types of documents including HTML, reStructured Text, Markdown and more as the input and lots of popular formats as the output (PDF, HTML, Docx, EPUB..). Documents that are converted can be grabbed instantly or Docverter can place them inside Amazon S3 so that you can get them late.
3. Profound Grid : A Grid System with SCSS
Profound Grid is a fresh grid system for creating responsive layouts (fixed and fluid). The grid system uses semantic markup and renders just the same in all browsers (it is using negative margins to calculate columns). It is built with SCSS, has support for nested grids and rules for pulling/pushing columns. There are various examples provided in Profound Grid’s website and a documentation helps learning it (which is pretty straightforward).
4. Workless : HTML5-CSS3 Framework
Workless is an HTML5-CSS3 framework for building cross-browsers websites with ease. It is a project that started as a mashup of Bootstrap + HTML5 Boilerplate, evolved more and now has most of the frequently-used stuff. The framework includes a grid system and styles for forms, tables, buttons, labels, notifications and typography. Also, there is an icon font and few jQuery plugins (modals, tooltips, text formatting) integrated.
5. CSS Browser Selector + : Cross Browser Responsive Design Helper
CSS Browser Selector + is a tiny JavaScript code that empowers CSS selectors, enabling us to write specific CSS code for each operating system and browser. It forces no hacks but promotes compliant code and also provides an alternative method of media queries for older browsers. The details it can detect include browser, browser version, platform, platform version, device, device version, min-width/max-width screen detection and orientation screen detection (landscape or portrait).
6. Radi : Visual Design App for Web
Radi is a complete visual design application targeting web with 100% standard and human-readable HTML + JavaScript code. It has built-in tools for creating/editing graphics (they can be imported too) and generating animations with (canvas) output that work in all modern browsers including mobile. There are ready-to-use filters + effects and you can always add your own code to create more customized stuff. The application is also pretty powerful in rendering video. It can even -very quickly- convert a web animation into a HTML5 video.
7. Forward : Open Source PHP E-Commerce Platform
Forward is a fresh e-commerce application (that is in the alpha stage) built with PHP and using MongoDB for storing data. The application is free, open source and built with developers in mind makes with easy custom coding, powerful templates and expressive syntax. It has a REST-like API for interacting with every feature from orders to customers or products. Thanks to MongoDB, the capabilities of the store is not limited to the default database schema and it is a breeze to have new fields/structures for everything.
8. SpriteMachine : WebBased CSS Sprite Generator
CSS sprites are perfect for minimizing the number of requests made to load the images and improving loading speed. However, for a sprite with many images, it takes time to create the sprite image and the CSS rules. SpriteMachine is a very straightforward web application for automating the sprite generation process. Just upload the images in a .zip file, choose the sprite image orientation (horizontal or vertical) and there you are. One great thing about the app is, it also asks whether the rules generates should be in CSS, SCSS or SASS.
