New HandPicked Goodies for Designers & Developers for September 2014 Part 1

As web designers, web developers and graphic designers we are constantly looking at for those new resources, tools and application that can help us increase our productivity while working on client or personal work.

Down below is a great round-up of what were some of the recently resources that really been release and deserve your attention — everything from some great JavaScript tools, jQuery plugins, Apps for your Desktop, Web & Mobile devices to some awesome items in HTML5, CSS, a free eBook, a responsive web design podcast, mobile development and some frameworks. For those WordPress lovers I’ve also includes some themes and plugins and finally i’ve added a bunch of design files such as icons, brushes, fonts etc and remember to check back with us next week to see our Part 2 of our monthly roundup of HandPicked goodies for us designers & developers

JavaScript & jQuery Plugins

Impluse

impulse

Impulse is a library for building dynamic physics based interactions, with a focus on mobile web, as you can create animations that flow naturally from the user’s movements as rather than animating properties for a set amount of time, impulse takes a start position, end position, and velocity.

As Impulse is small and weighs in at about 9k minified & gziped and also Impulse has no large dependencies so you don’t need jQuery, but it you can still include jQuery as it knows how to work with it. The animations flow smoothly from user interactions. When a user swipes an element, it moves at the velocity of their swipe.

FocusPoint

FocusPoint is a jQuery Plugin that makes sure your image looks great in any container, by ensuring the ‘spare’ parts of your image (negative space) are cropped out before the important parts. It’s made for ‘responsive cropping’, Dynamically crop images to fill available space without cutting out the image’s subject.

Chartist

Chartist.js is a simple responsive charting library built with SVG. As Chartist’s goal is to provide a simple, lightweight and non-intrusive library to responsive craft charts on your website. It’s important to understand that one of the main intentions of Chartist.js is to rely on standards rather than providing a own solution to the problem which is is already solved by the standard.

Timesheet

Timesheet.js is a JavaScript library that allows you to create HTML time sheets. With Timesheet you can visualise your data and events with sexy HTML5 and CSS3, simply create the time sheets with some sneaky JavaScript and include the Timesheet.js and configure your data and you set as this library has no external dependencies, no jQuery needed and of course no Angular.JS! It’s just contains a few lines JavaScript to generate a beautiful HTML5 layout and some really delicious CSS to be customized by mighty you.

fontFlex

fontFlex is a lightweight jQuery extension for dynamically changing font sizes according to screen / browser width. It’s intended to be used with responsive or adaptive CSS layouts. You simply define a default CSS font base by setting font-size: 1em and line-height: 150% on the body or intended element and declaring the font-size is optional, but highly recommended in case javascript is disabled and you simple call the plugin on said element.

Desktop, Mobile & Web Applications

Gravit – Mac/Windows/Linux/Chrome/In your browser – Free (in Beta)

gravit

Gravit is the a cutting-edge design app that will take your creativity to new heights. Gravit offers the creative possibilities of a full-scale design suite but in a snug app-sized package. It’s powerful yet easy-to-handle, as it has been custom designed from the ground up with an emphasis on versatility, fluidity and elegance and with complex design tasks are made simple through its robust suite of tools and highly responsive smart work environment.

Day One – iOS & Mac App – $4.99(iOS) or $9.99(Mac)

dayone

Day One is a journaling app for the iPhone, iPad and Mac. Record life as you live it. From once-in-a-lifetime events to everyday moments, Day One’s elegant interface makes journaling your life a simple pleasure.

SwiftKey Keyboard – iOS App – Free

SwiftKey Keyboard for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch is a smart keyboard that learns from you, replacing your device’s built-in keyboard with one that adapts to the way you type. The app learns your writing style to give you super-accurate autocorrect and intelligent next-word prediction, reducing keystrokes and getting smarter over time. SwiftKey Keyboard is loaded with features to make typing even easier, including multilingual typing and speedy swipe typing with SwiftKey Flow.

Transmit iOS – iOS App – $10.00

If you’re a pretty serious nerd like us, you probably have access to an FTP, SFTP, WebDAV or Amazon S3 server that you use for, say, web serving, group collaboration, as a personal cloud storage service, or who knows what.

Transmit iOS allows you to connect to that server and manage all your files, exactly as you’d expect, with Transmit you can Transfer, Make folders, Rename, Delete. Set Permissions. You know how it works, and Transmit does it and thanks to the power of iOS 8, Transmit iOS will also extend the standard iOS Share sheet — the one you see in, say, Photos or Voice Memos, when you tap the Share button — to include a brand-new Transmit button. That means you can now share your Photos directly to your SFTP server, or share a podcast voice memo straight to Amazon S3. It’s incredibly powerful. And there’s one more cool iOS 8 thing: in compatible applications, like iWork, you can Open a document directly off your server. And when you hit Save, it will silently and perfectly upload back to your server. In other words, you can use your server as your own seamless cloud storage.

Bower – Web/Desktop App – Free for Devs & Startups & for Large Teams you better contact Bowery

bowery

With Bower you can get a full dev environment in under 30 seconds, so get rid of expensive staging servers, resource-intensive virtual machines, and time-consuming local installation as you simply add a bowery.json file to your local source code that says what stack you need. No need to install any of that software locally or run any virtual machines then connect to bowery and simply share and collaborate by sharing your stack with co workers etc

Slides – Web App – Basic $0mo / Pro $6mo / Team $12mo

Slides

Slides enables anyone with a web browser to easily create, present and share beautiful presentations for a small price.

Dimensions – Browser Extension – Currently for Chrome Only

Dimensions is a browser extension for developers to measure screen dimensions, please note that this extension is currently only available for Chrome, When you use the extension you can measure between the following elements: images, input-fields, buttons, videos, gifs, text, icons.

But for the best experience set a keyboard shortcut in the chrome setting at the end of the extensions list to quickly enable and disable Dimensions also any of web/graphics designers that handed you mockups as PNGs or JPEGs you can just drop them into Chrome, activate Dimensions and start measuring.

Picdeck – Web App – Free

picdeck

Picdeck is a Tweetdeck-style viewer for Instagram you simply add columns for hashtags and users you want to follow and BAM the photos will start streaming in. Picdeck allows you to set-up individual columns for users and hashtags to monitor images as they get posted plus the site is about as responsive as a rock and was made in 10 hours and 33mins on Friday 22nd Aug at a Marvel internal Hackday.

Twibble – Web App – Free

twibble

Twibble.io is an web app that gives you a better way to easily publish content from any RSS feed to Twitter with beautiful imagery in each and every tweet. As it automatically pulls featured images and embeds them into each tweet without any fuss. It’s just beautiful media in each and every tweet as it has their advanced scheduling system which allows you to create custom tweet schedules.

Tweet every hour, only on certain days or even specific times. Now you can spend more time on the things that matter.

Gridlover – Web App – Free

Gridlover is a useful web app that is for creating a typographic system with modular scale and vertical rhythm. As gridlover gives you adjustable CSS for font sizes, line heights, and margins, with default output that includes body, p, and h1 to h4’s.

92five App – Web App – Free

92five app is a self-hosted project management web app that includes all the features of a the basic project management app, including projects, tasks, timesheets, a calendar, to-dos, reports, user profiles, and more. But watch out for the next version as it will include timelines, comments, appreciation, in-app messages, notifications and many other exciting features and that will be self hosted also.

CSS, HTML, Frameworks & Prototyping

Parse

Parse is a complete mobile app platform framework that focuses on creating unique & engaging apps on any platform. As Parse takes care of everything in your app it’s needs, from the core of your app to analytics and push notifications. You can instantly add a powerful core, push notifications, and analytics to your app with Parse. With native SDKs for Android, iOS, JavaScript, Unity, and more, Parse has an SDK for everyone, whether you’re creating a desktop or mobile app.

Titan

titan

Titan is a scalable graph database optimized for storing and querying graphs containing hundreds of billions of vertices and edges distributed across a multi-machine cluster. Titan is a transactional database that can support thousands of concurrent users executing complex graph traversals in real time.

Monit

monit

Monit is a small Open Source utility for managing and monitoring Unix systems. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

You can use Monit to monitor daemon processes or similar programs running on localhost. Monit is particular useful for monitoring daemon processes, such as those started at system boot time from /etc/init/ For instance sendmail, sshd, apache and mysql. You can also use Monit to monitor files, directories and filesystems on localhost. Monit can monitor these items for changes, such as timestamps changes, checksum changes or size changes.

Fibonacci

Fibonacci is an offshoot of an internal tool created to let non-developers design page layouts usingFlexbox, without you having to learn HTML or CSS as Fibonacci starts with a blank

, which you can then split to your heart’s content. It generates both the HTML and CSS needed to recreate the layout in your own pages.

Right after you’ve made your horizontal or vertical split, you can then add a new sibling, shrink or expand, give it a fixed width/height, remove or split it again. Remember to add a unit when you enter a fixed width or height and once you’re happy with the layout, hit the export icons to copy the generated code and paste it wherever you need it in your own code.

Orbit

orbit

orbit.css is an experiment with CSS preprocessors to create an easily consumbale orbital effect for DOM elements. It can be tweaked and configured to behave how you want. DOM element behaviour is then defined through data attributes. For example, the orbiting elements on this page can be paused on hover(tap on touch devices).

Aerobatic

Aerobatic is a cloud platform for front-end developers that makes it fun to build nimble HTML5 web apps in record time. Simply Aerobatic in a nutshell, is a platform as a service (PaaS) for HTML5 web apps, you could think of it as Heroku for the front-end. Like Heroku, the Aerobatic platform makes it super simple to deploy and host an app in the cloud.

Responsive Web Design Podcasts

Responsive Web Design Podcast is simply a podcasts that interview people who make responsive redesigns happens, this show is co-hosted by Karen McGrane and Ethan Marcotte.

Userium Usability Checklist

The Userium Usability Checklist is a simple usability checklist that catches the most common usability problems before user testing which saves you tones of headaches & money

Flynn

flynn

Flynn is the product that ops provides to developers, as ops should be a product team, not consultants. Flynn is the single platform that ops can provide to developers to power production, testing, and development, freeing developers to focus.

The Guide to Minimum Viable Products – Free eBook

The Guide to Minimum Viable Products is a master collection of frameworks, expert opinions, and examples of art and science that gives you the opportunity to start building great products with minimum resources as practiced by companies like Twitter, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Buffer among others.

WordPress Plugins & Themes

Lightbox Bank – Free Plugin

Lightbox Bank is an ultra modern lightbox free WordPress plugin for viewing photos and videos. Lightbox Bank features touch navigation and is designed keeping in mind the adaptability of Mobiles/Tablets. Lightbox Bank also fully Responsive and Retina Ready. It allows you to enable it on all WordPress images and attachments as well.

Table of Contents Plus – Free Plugin

Table of Contents Plus is a powerful yet user friendly WordPress plugin that automatically creates a context specific index or table of contents (TOC) for long pages (and custom post types). More than just a table of contents plugin, this plugin can also output a sitemap listing pages and/or categories across your entire site.

WP Geofence – Free Plugin

The WP Geofence plugin allows you to white-list the countries to which a specific post should be served. You can add multiple countries to white list. Each post will have individual white-lists and with addition to that, the plugin implements a simple shortcode with which you can show a small part of the post localised and by having the content within the shortcode it will be only visible to people from the specified country.

Dashboard Instant Finder – Free Plugin

If you, like me and many other that are tired of searching for a page or blog post in the list of posts or pages just to make some changes in it, you’ll find this little plugin extremely useful as once you’ve installed, it adds a new widget to your admin dashboard page and with that widget it will give you access a page or post editor by just typing any part of that post title, and the plugin will show up the list of suggestions (post title similar to what you’ve just typed), with direct links to post editor and post preview.

YouTube Traffic Pop for WordPress – Premium Plugin $20

YouTube Traffic Pop for WordPress is the latest TrafficPop™ that allowing you to gain thousands of new YouTube subscribers quickly and easily. The only plugin of it’s kind, YouTube Traffic Pop blends YouTube style clean looks and TrafficPop’s viral growth features to put your YouTube account on steroids! Tap into YouTube’s 1 BILLION+ monthly users and start gaining tons of new subscribers while boosting your traffic. More subscribers = more traffic = more $$$$

SupportEzzy Ticket System – Premium Plugin $26

SupportEzzy is an elegant support tickets system and faqs portal for WordPress. This is a stand-alone AngularJS app which runs on a single WordPress page of your website. This app does not interfere with your existing theme and plugins and will work with any kind of WordPress website.

Gravity Form Extension For WooCommerce – Premium Plugin $17

Gravity form extension for WooCommerce plugin allows you to create advanced product configuration forms which also can be linked in any product in WooCommerce. It is a poweful plugin will let you to use all the feature of Gravity Form in WooCommerce including conditional logic, pricing fields, user input prices, conditional-pricing fields, conditional submit button. You just need to create gravity forms including as much field field as you want. Then you can link this form with the single products from that product edit options. Very easy & user friendly interface.

Socio Multi Vendor for WooCommerce – Premium Plugin $32

Socio Multi Vendor Plugin is a WooCommerce Extension Plugin which turns your WooCommerce Site into a Multi Vendor Site. In addition to selling your Products on your site, you can add the Multi Vendor ability to your site so that other vendors can sell their products on your site for a commission. Socio Multi Vendor gives site admin the ability to create vendors in the backend. The site admin can add vendor, edit vendor, set commission rate for vendor and associate existing or new products to the vendors. Socio Multi Vendor Plugin works for All Default Product Types of WooCommerce and is Translate Ready.

Times – Free Theme

times

Times is a very right, high quality media WordPress theme that has support for WooCommerce. As this theme uses the featured image feature that you find inside of WordPress to create a stunning layout for your site. It will showcase your important articles, using our touch sensitive Carousel and with the beautifully designed sidebars are a bonus. Included in this are multiple widget areas right in the footer that are here to showcase your other important stuff plus this theme is 100% responsive and retina ready.

Perfetta – Free Theme

PerfettaA clear responsive food-focused WordPress theme that cuts out bloated features and focuses on understandable, attractive content. Perfect for small, intimate cafés or restaurants, or just bloggers with a taste for the finer things in life! With a one-column layout, your blog can combine simplicity with minimalist design for a refreshingly clean look that’s sure to keep people reading.

First – Free Theme

First

First is a simple yet flexible WordPress theme for blogs, this theme was made for all beginner bloggers to pro bloggers, it has features for everyone, as First is made using responsive design, so it offers a pleasant reading experience even on tablets and smartphones. First comes with 4 widgets and 3 menus. Because the customiser also allows you to set up custom headers and backgrounds, you can set your blog up just the way you want it.

Rosie – Premium Theme $58

rosie

Rosie is responsive WordPress Theme suited for creative designers, photographers, bloggers, product or service landing pages and even corporate web sites. Easy to setup and it comes with wide color customization, extended typography settings, Typekit support and fully customisable sections.

As Rosie is a Multi-Purpose Theme includes the innovative and state-of-art techniques and design features such as trasparent menus and elements, parallax effects, motion backgrounds, full page scroll etc.

Jollyfolio – Premium Theme $58

Jollyfolio is a new trendy portfolio concept for creative agencies, freelancers, graphic designers, illustrators, photographers or any kind of creative is now able to create a quick & easy portfolio to showcase their work with a unique and creative touch. Jollyfolio is the perfect one who are looking for a minimal and professional looking WordPress theme.

Facts – Premium Theme $58

facts

Facts is a minimalist, complete and flexible WP theme that brings you unlimited options to set up a Corporate, Creative or Photography business including smashing TD Menus. Create the most spectacular and unique site in any color, font or language! Make use of Facts exquisite and unique Sequence and Boxed image features.

Metropolitan – Premium Theme $43

Metropolitan is a professional multi-purpose WordPress theme that comes with an easy to understand, clean yet creative design. Metropolitan features an ultra responsive, user friendly layout that looks gorgeous on any devices including retina ready, HD screens. We believe simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, so we have designed this theme as user friendly and elegant as possible. Don’t hesitate, view the demo and discover the Metropolitan!