{"id":14768,"date":"2014-01-24T07:00:53","date_gmt":"2014-01-24T13:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adviceinteractivegroup.com\/?p=9043"},"modified":"2014-01-24T07:00:53","modified_gmt":"2014-01-24T13:00:53","slug":"web-development-and-design-tools-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advicelocal.com\/blog\/web-development-and-design-tools-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Web Development and Design Tools of 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

2013 was a great year here at Advice. Internet marketing is booming and web design and development are growing at an incredible pace. We asked the members of our design and development team to talk briefly talk about what tricks, tips, and tools they learned in 2013.<\/p>\n

Ryan Nielsen<\/a><\/h2>\n

\"Zapier\"<\/a>One of my favorite finds this past year was Zapier<\/a>, a tool that allows you to easily connect web applications. We\u2019ve used it extensively at Advice to handle communications between Salesforce<\/a> and Wufoo<\/a>, as Wufoo\u2019s direct integration<\/a> was unavailable to our organization. I couldn\u2019t be happier\u2014long gone are the days of grepping server logs trying to track down reports of lost leads.<\/p>\n

The number of integrations they offer is stunning to me\u2014there are so many creative things you could do with it with little or no programming effort.<\/p>\n

Andrew Taylor<\/a><\/h2>\n

This last year I used ColorZilla\u2019s Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator<\/a> for nearly every front-end cut-up I did making it the most used new tool in my workflow. The tool is described as<\/p>\n

A powerful Photoshop-like CSS gradient editor<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and it delivers. I like that it provides output not only in old-fashioned CSS but also as SCSS\/Compass (I am a big fan of Compass<\/a>). The feature that makes this a must-use tool for me is the ability to import images. I can take a slice of gradient background from Photoshop, upload it, and have the CSS I need to produce the gradient in record time. No more trying to recreate the gradient manually in CSS, and our sites get the benefit of using CSS3 gradients instead of images.<\/p>\n

The other tool I have used frequently is stypi.com<\/a>. Stypi\u2019s definition of itself is:<\/p>\n

A realtime editor that allows multiple users to make changes to a single document at the same time. All you need to do is share the URL with others to begin collaborating!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Cloud9<\/a>Think of it like Google Docs for coding. This comes in handy when you need to collaborate with another developer on a quick script or to troubleshoot an issue.<\/p>\n

If you are looking to collaborate on an entire project, and not just a quick file, check out Cloud9 IDE<\/a>. You can manage an entire project and even connect to services like GitHub<\/a>, BitBucket<\/a>, Heroku<\/a>, and more.<\/p>\n

Being a terminal nerd my favorite feature of Cloud9 is that is has full shell access and a terminal console at the bottom when you are in the editor. No right-clicking and creating a new directory when mkdir<\/code> will do.<\/p>\n

Andrei Podlesny<\/a><\/h2>\n

One of the most asked questions for me is, what is that font? Online font recognition services come to my rescue every time.<\/p>\n

There are several ways to recognize the font image.\u00a0Here are some of those than I use most often:<\/p>\n