WebAppers has been hunting the best free and open source resources for web developers and web designers for the past 20 months. With all of your support, we have successfully gather over 11,000 RSS readers and tens of thousands of regular readers.
And today, we have received an email from WordPress.org letting us know that WebAppers has been featured on The WordPress Showcase. If you do like WebAppers as well, please give us a good rating! Thank you for all of your support and wish you all have a merry christmas!
Mac Giving Tree has come back again! It’s the Holiday Season. The season of giving. MacHeist is going to treat us some insanely-great Mac Apps in celebration. Simply sign-up to MacHeist and come back Christmas morning to unwrap them.
And also, the Giving Tree now has iPhone application icons sprouting up around it, what does it all mean? When the icons grow and start wiggling you are able to click them and join a drawing for the application.
Source: Mac Giving Tree
Sometimes, you may find it difficult to look for some of the highest quality photoshop tutorials. In order to save your time, Photoshop Lady has been spending almost a whole year to search for the best photoshop tutorials for us.
Eventually, they have come up with The 100 Most Popular Photoshop Tutorials of 2008. These are selected from their published tutorials, with over 1 million votes and views from Photoshop users and readers. Most of the tutorials are high quality with detailed steps, they are suitable for both beginners and advanced Photoshop users.
Source: The 100 Most Popular Photoshop Tutorials of 2008
Fire Eagle is a new service designed to make it safe and easy to build and use location-aware applications and services. It’s a place where users can store and manage information about their current location that trusted apps and sites can update or access.
Want to make your website or mobile application more relevant or responsive to a user’s location? Or maybe you’ve found a way to capture user location and want to find cool uses for this info? By doing the heavy lifting for you and connecting you to a community of geo-developers, Fire Eagle makes it easier to build location-aware services. And Fire Eagle is completely free to use.
Requirements: –
Demo: http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/
License: License Free
Sinatra is a Ruby “micro framework” for developing Web applications. It seems to have reached critical mass – it’s on the cusp of becoming really popular.
This is a good time to check it out and see where it could fit into your own projects. Lots of awesome articles about Sinatra, Sinatra apps, and various links and resources have cropped up over the past few months.
RubyInside shows us the best links and resources for Sinatra they have found on Sinatra: 29 Links and Resources For A Quicker, Easier Way to Build Webapps. Most of which you should find useful as you start to explore Sinatra in detail.
The resources includes Tutorials and Presentations, Sinatra Applications, Deployment, Sinatra Blogging Engines and Sites Built on Sinatra.
Requirements: Sinatra
Demo: http://www.rubyinside.com/sinatra…
License: MIT License
Pattern Tap was born out of the love for the best interface designs on the web. They wanted a place where we could come and easily find the stuff we were looking for. Sometimes it was a matter of some inspiration for pulling off a horizontal nav bar with a ton of sections, sometimes it was just trying to visually separate some content.
They didn’t find any central place to find all this stuff, so they made their own. Pattern Tap is here to satisfy and encourage the inspiration needs of my interface design peers and peeps. They aspire to be the design tap for your next inspiration need.
Source: http://patterntap.com
As a web designer, you are going to need browser templates. When presenting your work to a client, adding a browser frame around your design will help you or your client get an idea of what the site will really look like.
Here are the free photoshop browser templates for your professional screendesign come in 1024×768 pixels and 800×600 pixels size , all kinds of different browser (Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari, Camino and etc…) flavours. For both sizes, the safe viewing area is marked in a separate layer.
Browser components are also separated onto individual layers so you can adjust them or switch them off them as you like: Page title, Address field, Favicon, Scrollbar and Dropshadow. You can download this amazing package for free.
Update: Our reader has just pointed out that the browser templates are not updated which we have not realized. We have now found a source of Photoshop Browser Templates for IE 7 and Firefox 3.0 instead. Please feel free to download them.
Requirements: Photoshop
Demo: http://www.webdesignerstoolkit.com/
Demo: http://piksels.com/photoshop-browser-templates/
License: License Free
jQuery is awesome. Jon Hobbs-Smith has been using it for about a year now The longer he uses it, the more he finds out about it’s inner workings.
He calls myself an “intermediate” jQuery user and he thought some others out there could benefit from all the little tips, tricks and techniques he has learned over the past year. Have a look at the following 25 excellent tips of jQuery, you might be able to learn something from it.
- Load the framework from Google Code
- Use a cheat sheet
- Combine all your scripts and minify them
- Use Firebug’s excellent console logging facilities
- Keep selection operations to a minimum by caching
- Keep DOM manipulation to a minimum
- Wrap everything in a single element when doing any kind of DOM insertion
- Use IDs instead of classes wherever possible
- Give your selectors a context
- Use chaining properly
- Learn to use animate properly
- Learn about event delegation
- Use classes to store state
- Even better, use jQuery’s internal data() method to store state
- Write your own selectors
- Streamline your HTML and modify it once the page has loaded
- Lazy load content for speed and SEO benefits
- Use jQuery’s utility functions
- Use noconflict to rename the jquery object when using other frameworks
- How to tell when images have loaded
- Always use the latest version
- How to check if an element exists
- Add a JS class to your HTML attribute
- Return ‘false’ to prevent default behaviour
- Shorthand for the ready event
Source: Improve your jQuery – 25 excellent tips
jQZoom Evolution is a new release of jQZoom with full featured. It is a javascript image magnifier built at the top of the popular jQuery javascript framework. jQzoom Evolution is a great and a really easy to use script to magnify what you want. It is easy to customize and it works on all modern browsers. This software is licensed under GPL. You can have your jQZoom in your website, eCommerce sites or whatever you want.
You can also look at other image zooming scripts we mentioned earlier on “Javascript and Flash Image Zoom Tools” and “Open Source Image Magnifier in Javascript”
Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://www.mind-projects.it/projects/jqzoom/
License: GPL License
SmartMarkUP is a lightweight and powerful JavaScript library that allows you to turn any textarea into a fancy markup editor. HTML, CSS, XML, Wiki syntax, BBCode or any other desired markup language can be implemented and/or adjusted to your preferences and business needs. SmartMarkUP doesn’t depend on any other JavaScript library and can be integrated with any already existing JavaScript library or code.
With single line of code you can turn any general textarea to powerful markup editor. As far as integration is unobtrusive, HTML of your application will remain unchanged. SmartMarkUP degrades gracefully for users without JavaScript without loosing functionality of your application.
SmartMarkUP is completely customizable and scriptable as well. Changing styles, implementing new markups, creating extra buttons and submenus or adding new functionality is a matter of minutes. SmartMarkUP is distributed under GPL open source licenses, so SmartMarkUP is absolutely free and you can do anything you like with it!
Requirements: Safari 3.x, Firefox 2.x, Firefox 3.x, Google Chrome, IE7, Opera
Demo: http://www.phpcow.com/smartmarkup/examples
License: GPL License
