Let’s face it, its fun to make apps! From the early idea phase to the deep code dive – building the next hottest app is a rewarding experience. However, with the need for apps to go live ASAP, we often run out of time to spend implementing a good user interface and design. What can we do? Luckily, there are many resources available to help save us time and make great designs better, faster, and from the start. With the rollout of OpenSocial v0.8, activities and Open Canvas, some of you might decide to revamp your apps by upgrading, simplifying or redesigning. Now is a great time to look at your designs and see if they can be refreshed bit. Here’s a comprehensive list of some of the best resources available on the ‘Net:
Web Design Toolbox: 130+ New Tools to Make You a Better and Faster Designer
This is the ϋber list, brought to you by Mashable. These sites range from CSS builders, to heat maps of a site, to favicon creators. Many of the subsequent sites I list overlap with this list from Mashable, making it a great place to start.
70+ Cheat Sheet Resources for Web Designers, Useful Cheat Sheets for Web Designers
You should see my desk at home; its wall-to-wall covered with cheat sheets. Some claim they’re worthless, but for me–cheat sheets allow the quick memory jog I need to keep working at full speed. Digital Labz and Six Revisions have compiled cheat sheets for the Adobe Suite, HTML, CSS and Typography, to name a few.
13 Amazing Firefox Add-Ons To Make Designers Lives Easier, Top 6 Internet Explorer Extensions for Web Developers, DebugBar for IE
Toolbar plugins can help you with debugging, tweaking and learning. Smashing Apps and Six Revisions lists add-ons for the two most popular browsers for web developers: IE and Firefox. Also check out DebugBar for IE, a tool that brings similar functionality of Firefox's Firebug into Microsoft’s ever-present browser.
7 Free CSS Editors, Which Is the Best? You Choose., CSS Layouts: 40+ Tutorials, Tips, Demos and Best Practices
CSS can get messy at times. That’s why it’s great that there are tools and tutorials to help you manage and organize all kinds of CSS goodness. Speckyboy has a great list of free CSS editors and Noupe has just about every CSS tutorial one would need.
That’s all I got for now. There’s a lot of very useful resources listed here, many with proof of real-world success. Do you have some resources you’d like to share? Throw them in the comments.
Now that you have all these great tools, take what you need and make those apps pop!
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