Alexa has a very good Natural Language Processing engine. However, there are other NLP engines in the market that can be used and those are including more and more capabilities.
Here you have the technologies used in this project
Since school is back in session, this month’s roundup has a learning focus. In addition to tools, many of the resources include guides, tutorials, and cheat sheets to help make design work easier.
Here’s what’s new for designers this month.
ScrollingMockup.io generates high-definition, animated scrolling mockups in minutes. All you have to do is paste your website URL, select from the expanding template gallery, add some music and post. You can create three mockups for free, and then this tool comes with a subscription model. The paid model allows for custom branding for mockups and more.
FilterSS is a curated collection of CSS image filters for use in projects. Upload an image, sort through the list, and then copy the code for the filter you want to use. It’s that easy!
Buttons Generator is a fun tool with so many button options in one place. Choose from three-dimensional, gradient, shadow borders, neumorphic, retro, animated, ghost, with arrows, and more all in one place. Click the one you like, and the code is copied right to your clipboard and ready to use in projects.
UI Cheat Sheet: Spacing Friendships is a fun – and memorable approach to figuring out spacing. This guide shows how close or far away elements should be based on “friend” circles with a couple of relatable instances. It’s one of the most relatable examples of this concept out there while emphasizing the importance of spacing in design.
PrettyMaps is a minimal Python library that allows you to draw customized maps from OpenStreetMap data. This tool can help you take online map design to the next level with cool, unique map visuals. It’s based on osmnx, matplotlib, shapely, and vsketch libraries.
Card.UX/UI is a card-style generator with more than 20 templates and elements to create custom cards. Use the on-screen tools to design it the way you want and then copy the code for easy use.
Couleur.io is a simple color palette builder tool that lets you pick a starting color and build a scheme around it. One of the best elements of the tool might be the quick preview, which shows your choices using the palette in context and in dark mode. Get it looking the way you want, and then snag the CSS to use in your projects.
CSS Accent-Color can help you tint elements with one line of CSS. It’s a time-saving trick that allows for greater customization for your brand in website design projects. Plus, it works equally well in dark or light color schemes. It supports checkboxes, radio, range, and progress bars.
Vytal shows what traces your browser leaves behind while surfing the web. This scan lets you understand how easy it is to identify and track your browser even while using private mode. In addition, it scans for digital fingerprints, connections, and system info.
Imba is a programming language for the web that’s made to be fast. It’s packed with time-saving syntax tags and a memorized DOM. Everything compiles to JavaScript, works with Node and npm, and has amazing performance. While the language is still in active development, the community around it is pretty active and growing.
SVG Shape Dividers Creator is a tool that allows you to create interesting shapes with SVG so that your colors and backgrounds aren’t always rectangles. You can adjust and side, change the color, axis, and flip or animate it. Then snag the CSS, and you are ready to go.
Image Cropper is a tool that allows you to crop and rotate images using the flutter plugin. It works for Android and IOS.
Noteli is a CLI-based notes application that uses TypeScript, MongoDB, and Auth0. The tool is just out of beta.
Yofte is a set of components for Tailwind CSS that help you create great e-commerce stores. The UI Kit is packed with components with clean and colorful designs that are customizable. The code is easy to export and clean. This premium kit comes with a lifetime license or a monthly plan.
UI Deck is a collection of free and premium landing page templates, themes, and UI kits for various projects. This is a premium resource with paid access to all of the tools. It includes access to more than 80 templates.
Star Rating: An SVG Solution is a tutorial that solves a common design dilemma: How to create great star rating icons for pages. This code takes you through creating an imageless element that’s resizable, accessible, includes partial stars, and is easy to maintain with CSS. It’s a great solution to a common design need.
Designing Accessible WCAG-Compliant Focus Indicators is another convenient guide/tutorial for an everyday application. Here’s why it is important: “By designing and implementing accessible focus indicators, we can make our products accessible to keyboard users, as well as users of assistive technology that works through a keyboard or emulates keyboard functionality, such as voice control, switch controls, mouth sticks, and head wands, to mention a few.”
Blockchain Grants is a tool for anyone developing blockchain applications and in need of funding. It’s a database of grants from a variety of organizations for different applications. Start looking through this free resource to help secure additional funding for your projects.
Basement Grotesque is a beautiful slab with a great heavy weight and plenty of character. There are 413 characters in the set with plenty of accents, numbers, and variable capitals.
Gadimon is a fun, almost comic book-style layered script. The font package includes a regular and extrude style.
Lagom is a sleek and functional serif typeface with 16 styles in the robust family from ultralight to extra bold italic. It’s readable and has a lot of personality.
Striped Campus fits our back-to-school theme with a fun, scholastic look and feel. The block letters have a thick outline stroke and some fun inline texture.
The post Exciting New Tools for Designers, September 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
The post Popular Design News of the Week: August 16 2021 – August 22, 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
It’s almost time for another season of change. Although the temperatures might not reflect it, this is the time of year where most of us start thinking about what’s next.
This collection of tools and resources for designers is just the spark to propel you forward with work as you think ahead. Here’s what’s new for designers this month.
Gradient.Art is a CSS-based gradient generator that’s packed with functionality and customization options. It’s more than just a color selector and is an actual gradient editor that allows you to work with a variety of controls to get just the color variations you want for projects. Create illustrations, patterns, icons, and more with this layer-based tool that’s still in beta.
Wicked Backgrounds takes some of the headaches out of creating just the right background for website design projects. It’s another easy and customizable generator designed to help create backgrounds with great color, depth, and balance for various project types. The makers promise more features in the future as well.
Typedream is not what you might expect from the name; it’s actually a website-building tool. It’s designed to help put the focus on the words of a design with a simple interface that most people can figure out. You can connect your own domain and then optimize for search with built-in SEO tags. It’s a zippy tool for simple sites.
Orbital is a zero-friction, super-interactive, customizable place to gather online. Pop in for meetings, quick chats, open-door office hours, or cowork together through the day – all using the same link. This premium tool has super fun backgrounds and meeting spaces.
Access Guide is your one-stop guide to accessibility information for the web. It’s packed with articles and information to help you understand parts and all of the WCAG 2.1 guidelines, the official standard for accessibility online. (Plus, content is sorted into neat cards that make things easy to search and find.)
InLine is a free JavaScript library built to create a simple text editor for web applications and mobile apps. The tool claims to be the smallest WYSIWYG editor designed to fit into any layout. The plugin allows you to edit and customize text elements practically anywhere.
3D Bay is a collection of free three-dimensional stock images that you can use for various projects. Collections are searchable. Most of the images are actually 3D scene illustrations, a popular design element with many SaaS website designs.
MeisterNote is a writing tool for teams. (It’s perfect for the new remote working world.) The interface is sleek and intuitive, and you can create customer workspaces for notes and teams to collaborate. One of the best functions might be the search feature, allowing you to find information in notes easily.
Shapecatcher solves an interesting problem. Have you ever visualized an element but don’t know what it is called or how to find it? This tool has a “drawbox” where you can sketch the element, and then it visually searches a database of 11,000-plus Unicode characters in multiple languages to find a close match that you can use online.
Batch Image Processing allows you to edit, crop, and style or add watermarks groups of images all at once. It’s a web-based tool that does everything in a flash and allows you to redownloaded processed images for quick use. (It’s great if you need multiple photos with the same crop or size!)
Integrately is an integration automation tool designed to help your apps, tools, and web elements talk back and forth. Connect apps to make tasks run on their own in ways that native software might not do alone. (Pro tip: Use it to connect with your email to send notifications or reports automatically.)
Vechai UI is a set of high-quality, accessible React UI components with built-in dark mode using Tailwind CSS. Components include pre-designed headless UI and Radix UI.
Style Free HTML Bootstrap 4 Template is a simple and minimally styled website template for a variety of project types. It’s a great website starter if you need to get a site up and running quickly.
Glass UI CSS Generator helps you create trending neumorphism/soft UI/glass UI style elements. The tool is a CSS generator that allows you to add some of your own elements and then pick styling options while outputting CSS and HTML.
Lineicons is a collection of more than 5,000 line icons that you can use for various projects. Every icon comes with free CDN, regular and light variations, an editor, and more to make it browsable and easy to use. The set has high legibility, and the free set of icons includes more than 500 options.
Carrd is a simple, free, and responsive one-page website builder that you can do pretty much anything with. It’s perfect for personal profiles, landing pages, or one-page websites. All it takes is a little imagination.
AdonisJS includes everything you need to create a fully functional web app or an API server. So stop wasting hours in downloading and assembling hundreds of packages and do it all with this framework for Node.js.
Eastman Condensed is a beautiful and functional sans serif that’s easy to read. The demo version is free for personal use, but a commercial license for the full family is available.
Peachy Rose Font is a fun novelty option that is fun and light. Plus, it is free for any use, even commercial. The set is fairly large for a free option, with 233 characters.
Selga is an expressive and complex display font with a retro feel. The swashes and tails are especially nice on this typeface, which is free for personal use.
The post Exciting New Tools For Designers, August 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
As the number of services grows in an organization, the problem of secret management only gets worse. Between Zero Trust and the emergence of microservices, handling secrets such as tokens, credentials, and keys has become an increasingly challenging task. That’s where a solution like HashiCorp’s Vault can help organizations solve their secret management woes.
Although there are secret management tools native to each cloud provider, using these solutions locks you in with a specific cloud provider. Vault, on the other hand, is open source and portable.
I had a customer inquiring about whether CockroachDB is capable of working with multi-level JSON. Considering their JSON would have up to 3 levels of hierarchy, they wanted to know whether CockroachDB is able to use native capability to access data multiple levels down. This prompted my interest and led to this tutorial. Surprisingly, CockroachDB does not inhibit any limitations to the number of levels in hiearchy and performance can be improved using various optimizations also discussed below.
cockroach start-single-node --max-sql-memory=.25 --insecure --background
cockroach sql --insecure --host=localhost
Every designer has their own preferred strategy for collecting resources. Some pluck brushes, fonts, and templates from different “stock photo sites” and public marketplaces. Others collect graphics from swipe files and forums around the web.
The never-ending desire for themes, visual content, and graphical components has prompted an influx of “design packages” to appear around the web. These all-in-one bundles, ranging from Envato Elements to Elegant Themes, promise a selection of valuable creative content in exchange for a single fee or monthly subscription.
If you’ve been planning to seek out a few of these high-value subscriptions yourself, you’re in the right place! Today, we’re going to talk about some of the top designer resources available on the market.
Probably the best-known of all the designer resource marketplaces, Envato Elements advertises itself as the unlimited creative subscription. On this website, you’ll be able to access around 54 million creative assets through a single subscription. There are endless resources to unlock here, ranging from templates for your graphics to video templates, audio, and stock photos.
Unlike most marketplaces, Envato gives you peace of mind by promising only the highest quality designs and graphics. Your content comes with quality assurance, and there are many PSD elements on the site, too, including stationery and web design templates, mock-ups, and more. Categories for your creative content include:
Pricing: Pricing starts at only $16.50 per month, and this gives you unlimited access to everything on the site, including millions of digital assets and stock photos. You’ll also be able to use various courses and tutorials on the website too.
Elegant Themes is an all-in-one creative resource for website themes. The solution offers you access to some of the most popular WordPress themes worldwide.
You’ll also get access to a visual page builder as part of the kit. When you sign up for the Elegant Themes subscription, you get access to all of the resources within, including the Divi page builder and WordPress theme, Extra, Monarch, Bloom, and more. If you’re a site builder or work on building pages for clients, this is a must-have subscription.
Elegant themes are currently the go-to resource for more than 750,000 people. It’s also home to some of the highest-rated themes around. Features include:
You can either pay for yearly access with Elegant Themes or pay a one-off price for lifetime access. For most, the lifetime option is likely to be a pretty appealing one. You don’t have to worry about renewing your subscription this way.
Template Monster offers the “ONE” web development membership, perfect for creative professionals. The MonsterONE offering is a complete unlimited subscription for all of your creative needs, with access to unlimited downloads, new weekly items, and simple licensing. You also get plenty of support from the Template Monster Team.
A goldmine for anyone who needs to upgrade their selection of video and photo assets, graphic templates, HTML templates, or anything else, Template Monster is packed full of amazing resources for any project. You can also find new products from fresh contributors all the time, so the value of your membership is constantly increasing.
Features include:
Pricing starts at a tiny $6.90 per month, with a slight discount if you pay yearly. The lowest-cost package gives you access to all of your graphic and design assets, but you won’t get any eCommerce or WordPress themes. However, if you upgrade to the all-in-one package at $14.95 per month, you get a more extensive range of resources.
Creative Market is another one of those amazing all-in-one environments for creatives and designers. This marketplace is supplied by thousands of independent artists from around the globe, each offering a host of top-quality designs and resources. You’ll find photos, graphics, templates, fonts, web themes, and countless other tools on the Creative Market.
If you’re looking for sheer size, it’s hard to find another company that competes with the Creative Market package. There are literally millions of ready-to-use products available, including Instagram templates, textures, and procreate brushes.
You’ll have access to 3D content for your immersive website designs and a host of purchasing products. Although there’s no “subscription model” per-se for this marketplace, you can invest in a credit plan that allows you to set how much you spend on your assets each month.
Features include:
The individual purchasing plan is likely to appeal more to people just beginning to test Creative Market for the first time. However, if you want a subscription experience, we’d recommend using the credit plan to estimate how many credits you’ll need each month.
All web designers know Adobe. The chances are that no matter what kind of creative work you do, you’ve developed a few skills with an Adobe product, from Photoshop to Lightroom. Adobe Stock is also one of the leading platforms for images on any topic.
Although Adobe Stock doesn’t compete with other marketplaces in terms of versatility, it still stands out as one of the main resources for designers. There are hundreds of millions of stock images, videos, editorial content, and vectors. You can also access a premium collection of custom content and 3D resources too. The great thing about Adobe stock is that you can easily create your own libraries and download content into your Adobe software. Resources include:
Adobe Stock is a little pricier than some of the other marketplaces available today, but it’s still pretty impressive. You’ll pay around $29.99 per month for 10 assets per month, or you can access a full annual plan at $199.99 per month. The amount you pay will depend on the quality of the resources that you want to download.
If Elegant Themes is the go-to resource for designers searching for WordPress themes and web design solutions, Motion Elements is the top choice for “motion” content. Here, you’ll find videos, SFX content, images, music, 3D solutions, and so much more.
Though it’s located in Asia, Motion Elements is available worldwide. The marketplace offers a monthly subscription plan wherever you can download unlimited products to suit your needs. There are tons of resources to choose from here, including After Effects elements, tools for Lottie, Premiere Pro, FCPX motion, DaVinci Resolve, and more.
Features include:
Pricing starts at $16.50 per month for an unlimited annual plan. This means that you can download as much as you like without having to pay any more. There is a small discount if you pay for a full year of access in one go.
Simple but effective, Creative Tim is an amazing resource for front-end and back-end content bundles. You get fully coded UI tools here that can help you create various mobile and web apps and a huge selection of dashboards and templates. If you’re the kind of designer who likes working on top of things like Bootstrap, React, Angular, Laravel, Node.js, and more, then Creative Tim has you covered.
This is one of the more technical creative resource packages that we’ve looked at so far, but it has a lot of value to offer. That’s probably why there are already more than 1.5 million people using the service. You can search through administration dashboards, UI kits, premium templates, free content, and design systems. Of course, everything is easy to access too. Features include:
There’s a free version of Creative Tim available for beginners if you want to keep your costs low, but it’s generally much better to sign up for the premium subscription. You can also purchase kits and templates on a one-off basis if you prefer to start small. However, the best prices generally come from buying the bundles from Creative Tim’s subscription side.
Similar in style to Motion Elements, Storyblocks is a creative design resource for any designer getting involved with the video world. This website is home to some of the best free-to-use videos around, with simple licensing available at a click. Aside from high-quality videos and templates, you also get audio and sound effects as part of your subscription and images or illustrations.
The unlimited access pass gives you all the resources you might want, from 4K and HD footage to music and sound effects, After Effects templates, and photos, vectors, or illustrations. You can also export a host of your own video projects with access to the Maker video editor, which allows you to make various changes to your custom video content. Features include:
The standard all-access plan from Storyblocks starts at a very affordable £39 per month for all of the content you might want. In addition, everything you get here is unlimited, so you don’t have to worry about running out of credits. There’s also an enterprise option available if you want to share access to resources with your team.
Motion Array is an all-in-one video creation platform for those with an eye for visual content. This fantastic resource center is packed full of valuable tools, from Da Vinci Resolve templates to Adobe Premier Pro Content. As part of your subscription payment, you’ll get endless presets, audio effects, plugins, video footage, tutorials, and more.
Though a little more expensive than some of the other premier subscription services on the market, Motion Array does offer a lot of content that you can’t get anywhere else. There’s an unlimited marketplace constantly updating with access to royalty-free footage, stock photos, music, and sound effects. You also get plugins built for Premiere Pro. Features include:
There’s a free subscription option for Motion Array, which you won’t find from most alternatives. This only gives you access to some basic stock photos and assets, but it’s a nice way to start. When you are ready to upgrade, you can pay $29.99 per month for the full stock media library, as well as requests for custom media assets and exclusive plugins.
As a designer or creative professional, keeping a constant stack of resources available is crucial to your ongoing productivity. Fortunately, there are tons of premium marketplaces out there today, making it easier to access everything you need.
Whether you’re looking for full UI kits and templates, or you want some free-to-use images and videos for the website content you’re creating, there’s something for everyone. With most monthly subscription services available at a highly affordable price, you could even sign up for multiple sites at once.
The post 9 Amazing Design-Resource Package Sites first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
CockroachDB is a cloud-native SQL database that features both scalability and consistency. The database is designed to withstand data center failures by deploying multiple instances of symmetric nodes in a cluster consisting of several machines, disks, and data centers. Kubernetes’ built-in capabilities to scale and survive node failures make it well suited to orchestrate CockroachDB’s databases. This is particularly for the reason that Kubernetes simplifies cluster management and helps maintain high-availability by replicating data across independent nodes.
This guide focuses on how OpenEBS LocalPV devices can be used to persist storage for Kubernetes-Hosted CockroachDB clusters.
Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
The post Popular Design News of the Week: May 24 2021 – May 30, 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Deno a pristine method to compose worker-side JavaScript. It solves many of the problems that Node does. It was created by the same person as Node. It uses the V8 JavaScript engine under the hood but the rest of the runtime is implemented in Rust and Typescript.
Deno may be a safe TypeScript run-time on Chrome V8. It had been initially written in Go and now has been revamped in Rust to remain far away from potential garbage collector issues. Deno is like Node js yet is centered around security. The rationale that Deno made was JavaScript. Significantly more horrendous than having a competitor who understands your thing back to front, Deno was made expressly to fix what Dahl saw due to the crucial weaknesses of NodeJs — including security issues, use of a centralized repository system (npm), and heavy tooling.
