Exciting New Tools for Designers, April 2024

Welcome to our April tools collection. There are no practical jokes here, just practical gadgets, services, and apps to make life that little bit easier and keep you working smarter.

WP Foundry

Consolidate the admin for multiple WordPress sites with WP Foundry. It allows you to control updates, manage plugins and themes, and run backups on all your sites from one app.

Jitter

Jitter motion design tool has been around for a while now, but some great new features have been added over the past few weeks: gradients, a ‘boomerang’ loop effect, and easy file-sharing.

WildSEO

Getting a site indexed in the first place is often the most frustrating part of SEO. WildSEO claims to have a 90% success rate for indexing in 48 hours, along with other automated SEO tools.

Lancer

Lancer is a simplified project management platform aimed at freelancers. It has a lot of good features, including integration with Upwork.

HourlyRate

HourlyRate is a freelance platform aggregator: it allows you to search and pitch for jobs on all connected freelance job boards from one place.

ClearVPN

ClearVPN is a new VPN service from MacPaw, the same people behind CleanMyMac. As well as macOS and iOS, it is also available for Android and Windows.

Dub.co

Dub.co creates short links with added analytics to manage your links. Analytics include geolocation, device, and browser data.

CloudTabs

CloudTabs is a web browser app for the Puter.com web-based desktop environment. Yes, it’s a browser inside a web app inside a browser.

Screen Ruler

Checking measurements like element size, margins, and padding on rendered pages can usually be done by drilling down in your browser devtools, but this handy little Chrome extension does it for you with a hover.

Jira Time Tracker

As you might guess from the name, this is a (free) time tracker plugin for Jira. It claims to be more intuitive and adaptable than Jira’s native time tracking.

Wondercraft

Wondercraft is an AI audio studio. It can clone your voice and use it to ‘read’ and record written text. Useful for demos, or for when a client doesn’t have the budget for a sound studio, actors, and editors.

btunnel

btunnel is a service that allows you to connect your localhost to the internet. Great for testing things like webhooks, and for collaboration during development, without having to pay for and configure hosting space.

Milestone

Milestone allows you to build gamified user experiences quickly and easily to improve product walkthroughs and onboarding.

Pictify

Pictify is an API that converts html/css to an image served as .png, .jpg, or .webp, or to an animated .gif. Handy for creating custom images for dynamic content like user profiles.

Tailscan Devtools

Tailscan allows you to build and debug a Tailwind site directly in the browser, and the latest major update offers deep integration with native devtools.

Paddi MacDonnell

Paddi MacDonnell is a designer and entrepreneur from Northern Ireland, follow her on Twitter.