What’s new for designers, March 2012

The February edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, frameworks, jQuery plugins, icons, productivity tools, responsive design resources, and some really great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments.

And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.

Osmosis

Osmosis is a simple app for managing your client questionnaires in a way that makes it easier to interact with your clients and gather the information you need from them. It’s made to fit into your workflow while still being easy to use for your clients.

MockVault

MockVault is a web app for getting approval from clients for your designs. It guides them through the design you’ve created, making it easier for them to review and approve.

Trajectory

Trajectory is a new app for managing software projects. It makes it easy to write user stories, track bugs and to-dos, while also facilitating discussion.

The Responsinator

The Responsinator lets you test any live website for responsiveness on a variety of mobile devices, including tablets and e-readers. All you have to do is enter a URL.

Font Awesome

Font Awesome is an icon font designed specifically for use with Twitter Bootstrap. It includes over 150 icons, is free for commercial use, offers infinite scalability, and is screen reader compatible.

TOC

Need a table of contents for your website? TOC is a jQuery plugin that does just that. It’s completely customizable, automatically highlights the current section, and is extremely lightweight.

Simple Green

SimpleGreen is an icon pack for sustainable businesses. The free version includes 48 environment and social icons, while the paid version includes 200 icons.

Codiqa

Codiqa is a tool for rapidly creating mobile app prototypes. It’s drag-and-drop jQuery interface makes it quick and easy to build what you need, and it also includes tools for sharing those prototypes.

Iubenda

Iubenda lets you quickly and easily generate a privacy policy for your website. Just add services, insert the owner, embed the policy, and show the result.

Curtain.js

Curtain.js is a plugin for creating a web page with multiple fixed panels that unroll with a curtain-rising effect. Navigation is done via keyboard, scrollbar, or your mousewheel.

Wonderflux

Wonderflux is a new free WordPress theme framework that lets you rapidly create WP themes. It’s licensed under the GPLv2, so you can use it on unlimited client, personal, and commercial sites.

Centratissimo

Centratissimo is an all-centered, auto-resizable layout. It includes smooth scrolling between pages and dynamic resizing, along with some other neat features, all done with jQuery.

Turn.js

Turn.js is a jQuery plugin for creating page-turning transitions with HTML5. It uses hardware acceleration, works on tablets and smartphones, is lightweight (only 6K), and is easy to manipulate.

jQuery Org Chart

jQuery Org Chart is a plugin that lets you render tree-like structures with nested elements. Data is entered in a nested unordered list, making it incredibly easy to use.

bgStretcher II

bgStretcher is a jQuery plugin for adding a full-page background image that proportionally resizes to fill the entire window area. It’s unobtrusive and simple to setup, and works with all modern browsers.

Hogan.js

Hogan.js is a JavaScript templating engine developed by Twitter. It’s only 2.5K, and was developed against the mustache test suite (so all the specs for that hold true for Hogan.js).

Entypo

Entypo is a set of more than a hundred pictograms, available as an OpenType font, a web font, and vector EPS. It’s Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licensed, so you can use it on personal and commercial projects.

Prefix Free

Prefix Free processes your code to add the current browser’s prefix to any CSS code, so you can use only un-prefixed CSS properties in your code. It works in IE9+, Opera 10+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+, and Chrome.

Zoomooz

Zoomooz is a jQuery plugin for making any element on your website zoomable. It’s supported by all modern browsers and has detailed settings options.

Underscore.js

Underscore.js is a utility-belt library for JavaScript that gives you a lot of the functional support you’d expect from Ruby or Prototype.js without extending any of the built-in JavaScript objects. It provides over sixty functions that support the usual functional suspects, including map, select, invoke, as well as more specialized ones.

Socialico

Socialico is a set of 74 social media icons, combined with a single weight font. Lowercase letters show the icons in a circle, while the capital letters of the same alphabet show the icons without the circle.

Warm Framework

The Warp Framework provides a set of tools for developing cross-platform themes. It currently supports Joomla and WordPress, and can be extended to work with other systems. It makes it possible to create themes that are easily portable between supported systems while retaining all features.

Glisse.js

Glisse.js is a responsive and customizable jQuery photo viewer. Transitions between images are entirely assumed by CSS3.

Collusion

Collusion is a Firefox add-on that lets you see all the third parties that are tracking your movements online. In real time, it shows how that data creates a spiderweb of interaction.

Cyfe

Cyfe is an all-in-one business dashboard that lets you see an overview of your entire business in real time. View data from Google Analytics, Salesforce, AdSense, MailChimp, Amazon, Facebook, WordPress, Zendesk, Twitter, and more from a single location!

jQuery HTML5 Placeholder Plugin

This jQuery HTML5 Placeholder Plugin adds cross-browser support for the HTML5 placeholder attribute functionality via jQuery. It has a couple of customization options and usage is very straightforward.

FanMix

FanMix is a “social inbox” that lets you manage all of your conversations online from a single inbox, just like email. Probably the most useful feature is the ability to search across your entire social history.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4

Lightroom 4 was just released and includes some great new features. It includes new adjustment controls to maximize dynamic range from cameras, as well as new and improved auto adjustments. The upgrade is $79, while the full version is $149.

Geared (name your price)

Geared is a distressed slab serif typeface with a style reminiscent of athletic t-shirts. It comes with four unique weights: thin, regular, bold, and extrabold.

Abraham Lincoln (name your price)

Abraham Lincoln has perhaps the best tagline of any typeface: “Tall. Skinny. Honest.” It was inspired by the proportions of its namesake and the advertisements and playbills of the 1800s.

Sedgwick Co (free)

Sedgwick Co is an uppercase slab serif typeface inspired by the city of Wichita, KS. It’s both classic and modern, and reminscent of western-style fonts.

Web Serveroff (free)

Web Serveroff is a modern, condensed sans serif typeface. It comes in both regular and italic styles.

Kommisar ($16.25)

Kommisar is loosely based on the Trajan capital in Rome and influenced by Father Edward Catich, an American sign painter and lettering artist. It’s contemporary, but with a decidedly antiquarian look.

Yeti ($5)

Yeti is a display typeface, hand-drawn with a hint of calligraphy. It supports multiple languages and even comes with some graphics and web icons.

Intro (free)

Intro is a free geometric font from FontFabric. The letterforms are mostly created based on simple geometric shapes — triangles, circles, and squares.

Know of a new app or resource that should have been included but wasn’t? Let us know in the comments!

Cameron Chapman

Cameron Chapman is a freelance writer and designer from New England. You can visit her site or follow her on Twitter.