Five Exciting New Web Tools
As a continually evolving digital agency in Leeds, we’re always on the look out for the best tools and applications to help save us time and create amazing experiences for our clients.
From tools to make developer’s lives easier, to apps that’ll create prototypes from sketches on your iPhone that our project managers will love, there are a lot of exciting products out there.
Here are a few of the tools that the Parallax team are looking forward to using over the next few months.
Andy Fitch
Director
CSS BLEND MODES
The implementation across all browsers of CSS blend modes is something we’re looking forward to working with. Heavily promoted by the guys over at Adobe, it allows the combination of graphical objects using special formulas to achieve much more expressive combinations of shapes and images than you’d be able to achieve with just opacity. It’ll allow us to recreate stunning blending modes from CSS similar to those designers create everyday using Photoshop or Illustrator. There are a number of examples of CSS blend modes in action across the web and our very own Andy Fitch has put together an example of his own, you can see this by clicking here.
Note: This will only work in an experimental browser (Canary / Aurora etc) or by enabling experimental features within your browser. You can do this by following the instructions below:
For Chrome and Opera navigate to:
chrome://flags
opera://flags
Now scroll down untill you find Enable experimental Web Platform features and click the Enable button.
In Firefox navigate to:
about:config
Enable mix-blend-mode and background-blend-mode
Safari users will need to update to the Nightly build.
Unfortunately it’s currently unavailable in all Internet Explorer versions stated as ‘under consideration’ by Microsoft.
James Hall
Director
Finch
We can’t wait for Finch. It’ll allow our developers to share their work across multiple devices without the need for deployment and allow us to share a risky branch we’ve been working on without having to merge it into the master. Furthermore, it will allow us to perform testing across devices on development not ready for release yet. So how does it work? Finch ‘creates a secure connection between your computer and their servers made publicly through a unique URL. The HTTP request is then served back to the requester as if it were being locally browsed. It’s compatible with OSX, Windows and Linux and they have a range of packages ranging from $0 to $50 a month.
To get finch up and running just:
npm install -g finch
finch forward http://thisismysite.dev
Christopher Mills
SEO Manager
MAYNARD
Good news! The Raspberry Pi is getting an upgrade, Maynard. Hailed as ‘functional, light and pretty’ compared to its predecessor LXDE. Honestly, I can’t wait! LXDE feels like you have to wait an eternity whenever trying to open an application. Working with Collabora, Raspberry Pi have managed to create a lightweight Weyland shell called Maynard. At the moment it’s still in development but you’re able to download a moderately stable version today by using:
wget http://raspberrypi.collabora.co.uk/setup-maynard.sh
bash ./setup-maynard.sh
maynard
Equally the instructions are here
Feel free to contact me if you need any help with this.
Richard Crosby
Web Developer
HHVM
The HipHop Virtual Machine or HHMV is a virtual machine designed for executing PHP and Hack programs. It was developed and open sourced by Facebook due to the usual Zend+Apache combinations being insufficient in serving large applications which are built in PHP.
You can get it as a pre-built package or build it from source here
Tom Faller
Project Manager
Marvel
This excellent extension to the already popular app by Marvel allows you to take photos of your sketches using your iPhone and prototype them on your mobile. All your files instantly sync with Dropbox and allow you to share your designs through Twitter, SMS or email. PSD’s are fully supported and it’s quick and easy to use. We managed to throw together a quick mock up in a few minutes.
Get it from the app store here
We can’t wait to get going with them. What are you looking forward to using? If you know anything you think we might have missed, or if you’ve got some opinions on any of these let us know.