Fresh Resources for Web Designers and Developers (December 2015)

Web Development scene has been progressing at the speed of light this year. CSS3 has been well adopted, and we are less dependent on polyfill since the latest browsers are really good at supporting the latest web standard. Microsoft Edge was introduced, Google released two open sources for the Web: Material Design Lite and Polymer 2.0.

So let’s wrap up the year with a few handy tools for fellow web developers. We have a couple of JavaScript libraries as well as tools to work more effectively with jQuery. To find more, check out the full resources for web developers series.

Github Corner

It is only recently I realized that the Github corner, which we usually see on the homepage of an open-source project, is already 7 years old. Time for a facelift. Github Corner is an initiative for a more modern and fresh look for the Github ribbon. It uses SVG instead bitmap graphics which allows it to remain sharp in high-resolution screens.

Sweet (Slack) Themes

Slack has become of the most popular chat app in small businesses, startups, and with developers. Compare to other apps like Skype and Google Hangouts, Slack is customizable in multiple ways, including its theme – the appearance and nuance of the app interface. Here is a collection of ready-to-install Slack themes .

SummerNote

SummerNote is a JavaScript library to create a WYSIWYG editor. SummerNote is developed on top of prominent open-source projects: jQuery, Bootstrap and Font Awesome. Deploying SummerNote is as easy as deploying any other JQuery library, and it is the perfect alternative library to TinyMCE, especially if your web uses Bootstrap as its foundation as well.

BackstopJS

BackstopJS is a great tool for testing website responsiveness which is a tedious process. In a nutshell, this library makes the task of testing a site on multiple screen sizes a lot more seamless by automation. The tool will capture screenshots of the website and annotate which page passes and fails the test based on the specified parameters and screen sizes. It is like a Unit Test tool for deploying responsive website.

SuitCSS

SuitCSS is a boilerplate, comprised of its own CSS Pre-processor that supports CSS future syntax like Custom Property and Custom Media Query, a handful of utility classes based on the BEM methodology to align, size, and position elements, and a lot of CSS modules to get started with developing a well-built website.

Bind

Bind is a native OS X app that allows you to build web interfaces and layouts using GridStyleSheet, a layout algorithm developed by TheGrid. GSS allows you to layout websites effectively. For example, contrary to CSS, GSS allows vertical alignment of its element containers with a single line of code.

AntiModerate

AntiModerate is JavaScript library that loads images more smartly. With this library, even under slow Internet connections you can load a smaller-sized image first while the larger image is still loading in the background. Once fully loaded, the larger image takes center stage. This technique could pose a faster loading speed for your web pages.

jQuery Tips You Should Know

Cool title and even cooler content, this is a colletion of jQuery tips that we should know (half of them I wish I had known much, much earlier). Totally worth checking out.