Simple Tools for Front-End Developers

Continuing with the roundup and reading list theme this week, below is a list of tools that might be of interest to front-end developers.

As always, if you have a tool, book, or script you’d like to share, add it to the comments.

CSS Menu Maker

An online tool for generating HTML and CSS for cross-browser menus. Some good options here, including some animated versions with CSS3. You can edit the menus right on the site, and then download the code as a zip file.

Pure CSS3 On/Off Flipswitch

On/off switches, generated with pure CSS3. They’re animated, and can mimic the same kinds you see on iOS, Android, and Windows 8. Code is genreted on the fly and lets you test the result and customize to your own needs.

CSS3 Multi Column

I like tools like this. It tries to do one thing well. In this case, it’s a CSS3 generator for multi-columns. And the fields for customization are laid out in a sort of mad libs way, which makes it easy to read and use.

simpl

The site “aims to provide the simplest possible examples of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.” This looks great for beginners and even more exprienced developers just looking for simple examples of various front-end features.

Img to CSS

At first, this looks like a useless tool. It converts an image to pure CSS, and the code generated is awful. But it’s promoted for use in Email clients, to prevent images from being blocked, which sounds like a valuable use case for some.

Pageguide.js

A script that lets you add an interactive page guide to elements on your site or app. The created guide elements can be clicked to get info on the selected object. Looks great for giving users a guided tour of app functionality, without writing everything from scratch.

The Toolbox

Finally, if you want more tools, this site is a repository of single-page apps and code generators, categorized. You can submit your own tool for inclusion too.