There are tons of great apps and services out there that can help designers and developers do their job better.
In fact, and perhaps you can agree with me here, there are too many and a lot of them do pretty much the same thing. The following are 3 killer design and development apps that I have found to be amazing and that have helped me do my job better.
In fact, I’m not sure how I could live without some of them:
Firebug is genius. Essentially an add-on to Firefox, (and why aren’t you using FF?) it provides an amazing service for designers and developers alike. This is a “lifeblood” tool for me. Check it out.
XRAY is unbelievable. With a simple click from your bookmark bar you can click any element on a website and see it’s information. A recent find, this tool is sweet (and I can’t believe it’s free…).
Notable is a great way to provide feedback on designs in a simple and easy to understand format. One of the classiest features is the export to PDF where they provide an amazing pdf formatted document of the design with notes. A definite must if your a designer and have a team.
Ok, let me have some of your top 3!
money,time,connections…
Oh my goodness! Thank you for telling us about XRAY. I'm in love with it (you know, in a "nothing my husband will be jealous about" kind of way). I'm gonna spread the word about this one.
ur welcome!
your site… is it down?
Lol, yeah my site is prob down. I'm a newb to this whole web site thing and I can't figure out why my site loads so slowly and why it goes down periodically. I'm doing some research into it…
Oh and btw… XRAY is awesome
Thank you for XRAY that thing is awesome. I already use firebug and love it.
I use colorzilla as an ad-on for FF, it tells you what colors are on a website by clicking the eye dropper and then selecting the area you want to get the rgb for. Love it
colorzilla is dope! never used it before.
About FF & FireBug, I used Firefox for windows, and it was far superior to everything else. But on the mac, I feel like Safari just works better.
But I do use Firebug to debug for the rare FF Quirk.
Ever used Espresso, by the guys who make CSSEdit? I like it a lot..
i use coda… but espresso is great too! i ahve that.
I don't use FF because I use Safari… which is faster and more advanced when it comes to standards… if it had 1password support I would use Stainless.
Killer Apps? Erm… the only ones I use… Espresso, Xampp Control Panel & Safari (along with checking in FF & the dreaded IE6)
I use WebDeveloper which does what your number 2 does, plus a whole lot more. I use Fire FTP for files, but I might think about using Firebug for code within firefox.
yes, definitely! webdev.
In addition to the ones you’ve already mentioned:
1. YSlow. Awesome for finding some of the performance bottlenecks.
2. Windows Resizer. Great to see how the site will look any given resolution.
3. ColorZilla. Grabbing colors, zooming in, DOM color analyzer, etc.
WORD!
Is Firebug much better than the “Inspect Element” feature in Google Chrome?
that's a good question. i'm a fan of chrome, but don't hvae it on macs…
its a 100x’s better.
I think the inspector element is hard to use in chrome.
Maybe I am just use to using firebug, but I feel like inspector element is hard to stand up to its name and help you inspect.
I am always using Firebug, It is probably the most used function of my browser, the other two I will definitely look into thanks for the post.
Firebug has to be number 1
Then I really like MeasureIt
And now I have to say Xray