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Rather than spring cleaning, do some spring “shopping” for tools that will make your design life easier. Packed with free options this month, this list is crammed full of tools and elements that you can use in your work every day.

Here’s what new for designers this month:

April’s Top Picks

Charts.css

Charts.css makes creating beautiful online charts that much easier. It’s a modern CSS framework that uses CSS utility classes to style HTML elements as charts. It’s accessible, customizable, responsive, and open source. There’s a quick start option and available source code to work with.

Haikei SVG Generator

Haikei is a web app that helps you generate SVG shapes, backgrounds, and patterns in all types of shapes to use in projects. Everything can be exported into the tools you are already using for easy integration, and every element is customizable. The tool is free right now – no credit card needed – and you get access to 15 generators and can export in SVG and PNG format. A premium option is on the way, and you can sign up to get notified for access.

Fluid Space Calculator

Fluid Space Calculator helps you create a related space system and export the CSS to implement it. The calculator allows you to add space value pairs and multipliers and see the impact on the screen before snagging the related code. It’s great for determining how things will look in different viewports and for creating custom space pairs.

Night Eye WordPress Plugin

Night Eye WordPress Plugin helps you create a dark mode option for your WordPress website with ease. It’s completely customizable, schedulable, and one of those things that users are starting to expect. The plugin has free and paid versions – the only difference is a link to credit the developer.

3 Productivity Boosters

Macro

Macro is a supercharged checklist app for recurring processes. It’s designed to help teams document, assign, track, and automate for maximum efficiency. Now is the time to test this tool because it is free in public beta.

Writex.io

Writex.io is a free writing app that uses AI and smart features to help you write more efficiently. It can check readability as you write, make suggestions, check spelling, and allows you to work with versioning. All the settings are customizable, so you can get help and suggestions when you want them and avoid things you don’t want.

Taloflow

Taloflow, which is in beta, is a tool that helps you find the top cloud and dev tools for your use case. This is designed to be a time-saving solution to finding the right infrastructure and API products for your work.

8 Kits with Illustrations and User Interface Elements

Skribbl

Skribbl is a collection of free, hand-drawn illustrations in a light and fun style. The black and white sketches are friendly, and the collection keeps growing. Plus, the illustrators are allowing them to be used free for any use.

Mobile Chat Kit

Mobile Chat Kit is a free starter kit for building apps in Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD. It includes more than 50 screen options with mapped-out flows for a quick-start project.

Flowchart.fun

Flowchart.fun is exactly what the name implies. The app allows you to type, create nodes, and link elements to develop simple flow charts quickly. Then you can alter shape and size with drag and drop. Export it for use as an SVG, JPG, or PNG.

Shuffle

Shuffle is a marketplace packed with UI libraries to help you with a variety of digital projects. There are more than 1,500 pre-built components to choose from with professional designs. This premium tool comes with a monthly subscription or lifetime license.

Cryptocurrency 3D Pack

Cryptocurrency 3D Pack is a set of icons with fun colors in three-dimensional shapes that you can use to represent different crypto elements. The pack includes 55 #D icons in PNG and BLEND formats.

Stratum UI Kit for Figma

Stratum UI Kit for Figma includes nine free screens that are ready to use. Options include API documentation, Kanban, document, data dashboard, ecommerce product list, ecommerce product options, payments spreadsheet, cloud storage, and newsfeed.

Conic.css

Conic.css is a collection of simple gradients that you can browse and then click to copy the code into your CSS to use them in projects. It’s quick and easy while using trendy color options.

Artify Illustrations

Artify Illustrations is a Figma plugin that allows you to access more than 5,000 SVG and PNG illustrations within the app. It’s got a built-in search feature, everything is high-resolution, and the huge library includes various styles.

2 Tutorials

A Complete Guide to Accessible Front-End Components

A Complete Guide to Accessible Front-End Components is an amazingly comprehensive guide from Smashing Magazine with everything you need to know about accessible components. From tabs to tables to toggles to tooltips, you’ll find it all here and learn how to use it the right way.

Grid CheatSheet in 2021

Grid CheatSheet in 2021 is a useful guide of everything you can do with CSS Grid. Plus, it has plenty of fun illustrations and an accompanying video.

8 Fresh and Fun Fonts

Athina

Athina is a modern display serif with beautiful connector strokes. The free version is a demo, and there’s a full family that you can buy.

Brique

Brique is a free (personal and commercial) display font with a wide stance and uppercase character set. The letters have a lot of personality and a readable configuration.

Code Next

Code Next is a great geometric sans serif with a full family of styles. Including two variable fonts. It’s highly readable and would work for almost any application.

Inter

Inter is a simple and functional sense serif family with everything from extra light to heavy weights. The extra character personality makes this a fun and functional font option.

Nothing Clean

Nothing Clean is a fun grunge-type option. It’s an all uppercase character set with alternates.

Playout

Playout is a fun, hand-drawn style typeface with interesting glyphs and alternate characters. The most fun feature might be the pawprint characters in the demo set.

Rockford Sans

Rockford Sans is a geometric typeface with subtly rounded edges. It has eight weights and italics. With its large x-height and round features, it’s legible and friendly. It’s suited to cover a wide variety of tasks from editorial to brand design and advertising.

SpaceType

SpaceType is a fun and funky typeface in regular and expanded styles. The stretched letterforms make interesting alternates for display purposes.

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The post 25 Exciting New Tools For Designers, April 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.


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article imageIn our previous article from this series shared a look at the logical common architectural elements found in a headless e-commerce solution for retail stores.

The process was laid out how we’ve approached the use case and how portfolio solutions are the base for researching a generic architectural blueprint. It continued by laying out the process of how we’ve approached the use case by researching successful customer portfolio solutions as the basis for a generic architectural blueprint.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

article imageIn our previous article from this series we introduced a use case around headless e-commerce for retail stores.

The process was laid out how we’ve approached the use case and how portfolio solutions are the base for researching a generic architectural blueprint.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

Hybrid cloud architectures are the new black for most companies. A cloud-first is obvious for many, but legacy infrastructure must be maintained, integrated, and (maybe) replaced over time. Event Streaming with the Apache Kafka ecosystem is a perfect technology for building hybrid replication in real-time at scale.

App Modernization and Streaming Replication With Apache Kafka at Bayer

Most enterprises require a reliable and scalable integration between legacy systems such as IBM Mainframe, Oracle, SAP ERP, and modern cloud-native applications like Snowflake, MongoDB Atlas, or AWS Lambda.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

While APIs make it simple to share data back and forth between applications, the process of managing APIs can be anything but simple. A developer working with hundreds of different APIs over the course of their work can get bogged down trying to test, implement, and manage it all, turning what is supposed to be something straightforward into another layer of complexity.

Building API integrations is complex, but Postman makes it easy to create an API service. With Postman, developers can simplify every step of building and managing APIs — from development and testing to collaboration and support — so that more people can design APIs with simplicity, usability, and consistency.

Source de l’article sur DZONE


Introduction

While many of us are habituated to executing Spark applications using the ‘spark-submit’ command, with the popularity of Databricks, this seemingly easy activity is getting relegated to the background. Databricks has made it very easy to provision Spark-enabled VMs on the two most popular cloud platforms, namely AWS and Azure. A couple of weeks ago, Databricks announced their availability on GCP as well. The beauty of the Databricks platform is that they have made it very easy to become a part of their platform. While Spark application development will continue to have its challenges – depending on the problem being addressed – the Databricks platform has taken out the pain of having to establish and manage your own Spark cluster.

Using Databricks

Once registered on the platform, the Databricks platform allows us to define a cluster of one or more VMs, with configurable RAM and executor specifications. We can also define a cluster that can launch a minimum number of VMs at startup and then scale to a maximum number of VMs as required. After defining the cluster, we have to define jobs and notebooks. Notebooks contain the actual code executed on the cluster. We need to assign notebooks to jobs as the Databricks cluster executes jobs (and not Notebooks). Databricks also allows us to setup the cluster such that it can download additional JARs and/or Python packages during cluster startup. We can also upload and install our own packages (I used a Python wheel).

Source de l’article sur DZONE


WebDriverIO: Next-generation Automation Framework

WebDriverIO is an open-source next-generation automation framework, that allows us to automate modern web and mobile applications. It has an extended set of built-in and community plugins that help in designing robust, scalable tests and easily integrate with third-party applications including cloud services (BrowserStack, Applitools, Sauce Labs), Docker, Jenkins, Bamboo, GitHub, and many more.

It helps in designing automation tests for web applications and native mobile applications in just a few lines of code, making it very popular among developers and testers. It runs on WebDriver protocol to support cross-browser testing, and Chrome DevTools protocol to support Chromium-based automation. 

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Developing a mobile application involves several tasks. There are only two major platforms of mobile applications- Android and iOS. Developers use kotlin and Java to build Android applications while use Objective C and Swift to develop iOS applications. The native development process offers premium performance and API integration and easy to access hardware devices and much more.

One thing you need to keep in mind while doing native app development is that it’s costly, and it depends on the number of platforms you want to cover. This means different applications from different platforms, two codebases, two separate development projects, double the expenses.

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Introduction

 

While we have a lot of blogs for various complex Integration scenarios and methods using MuleSoft, a few of my friends asked me to write something more basic, step-by-step process to get started with the MuleSoft Anypoint Studio and start integration using this amazing tool.

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Today’s world regards time as of paramount importance. This said, the disruptive tech-enabled innovations are foremost meant to save both business owners’ and users’ time. The industry of software development is based upon the same postulates – the sooner the better, provided that timely product deliverables are coupled with efficiency and convenience.

The Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) practices are among popular software engineering industry trends that help cut costs, time, and risks associated with delivering changes. Yet another trend to optimize the industry lies in applying DevOps methods, oriented to increase the efficiency of development and operation processes, and to speed up product delivery.

Source de l’article sur DZONE