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Exciting New Tools for Designers, December 2020

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Jumpstart your next design project or speed up a workflow with some of these new tools and resources. With so many new tools being developed all the time, you are almost certain to find something that can help you with projects.

Here’s what new for designers this month.

Everypixel Patterns

Everypixel Patterns solves a common design problem: Creating seamless patterns with graphic editors is such a long and exhausting process. That’s why some people choose to get patterns from stock websites but that can be a challenge too (and difficult to search). This tool makes getting patterns less time-consuming. It includes a gallery of well-designed content, which you can customize and edit as needed.

Multiavatar

Multiavatar is a free and open-source multicultural avatar maker. Type something in the input field and generate one of 12 billion avatars. (Everything is randomly generated and free to use.)

Lobe

Lobe is a machine learning app from Microsoft that helps you create and train models. Start by showing the app examples of what you want it to learn and it will train a model for you. The tool is pretty easy to understand and you don’t need or experience or code knowledge to use it and you can train an app for free on your computer.

Laser Cat

Laser Cat is a silly and fun Google Chrome extension that adds a cartoon cat to your browser that allows you to zap away anything you want to remove in the browser window. It’s light and fun. Go play!

Pattern Collect

Pattern Collect is a curated gallery of patterns by various designs and illustrators. You can download patterns for use in projects or submit your own to share with the design community. The library is searchable and you can get new patterns via email if you subscribe.

FarbVelo

FarbVelo is a color palette generator that shows a new and random scheme with every refresh. The color choices are fresh and could work for a variety of projects, too.

CSS Clip Path Editor

CSS Clip Path Editor is a cool little pen by Mads Stoumann that puts an image inside of almost any clip path you can imagine. There are presets to choose from or you can adjust the settings and paths to create your own image shape.

Responsive & Configurable SVG Waves

Responsive & Configurable SVG Waves is a soothing pen by Jhey. Change the background and wave elements for a simple and cool animation in SVG.

Veed

Veed lets you host, edit, and deliver videos in the cloud using a REST API. It works on any browser, device, and bandwidth, and keeps your website light, even when delivering heavy video content.

Overlay

Overlay is a plugin for Figma or Sketch that transforms components and symbols into clean and reusable React, Vue, or HTML code. The benefit? Use it to create more consistent websites and design systems more quickly and in a pixel-perfect manner.

List.js

List.js is a library for adding search, sort, filters, and flexibility to tables, lists, and other HTML elements. It is built so that it will work on existing HTML and be invisible. Plus, it is simple to install and use.

What Are Design Tokens?

Design tokens are a “hot term” says Andy Bell. So, he wrote an explainer that breaks down what they are and how they might look in a standard data format like JSON. Read the explainer and you’ll be able to identify design tokens and understand them.

SVG Path Editor

SVG Path Editor makes it easy to manipulate paths for any SVG element. The grid – if you choose to use it – helps edits stay symmetrical and easy to manage.

Operator Lookup

Operator Lookup is a practical and fun tool. Enter a JavaScript operator in the search box to learn more about what it does. (You can also choose from a “keyboard” of options.) Thanks for the tutorial, Josh W. Comeau.

Beacon

Beacon is a tool designed to help you write, run, and share SQL in Slack. It makes collaboration easy so you can work on and run queries, debug, and resolve issues all in a single platform.

Plaiceholder

Plaiceholder transforms your images into lightweight placeholders using pure CSS or SVG.

Machine Translation

Machine Translation is available as Cloud API, on-premise translation server, and SDK that can be easily integrated into lots of business cases. Both solutions work with 110 languages.

Draggable Blend Generator

Draggable Blend Generator does just what the name implies. Change the blend mode of a background and foreground using a draggable tool so that you can see the changes in real time. Just enter the URL of a background image or pattern and color swatch and you are ready to go.

Jam Wand

Jam Wand is a “magic wand” for making changes on your website, starting with copy. Click on any text, edit it, and submit the change to GitHub to be merged into the code. Copy changes as easy as click, type, and click again. (This tool is still in beta.)

Boost UI Kit

Boost UI Kit is a collection of elements and components that will help you finish website design projects using a bright and airy style. It works with Figma for easy integration.

Romanizer

Romanizer is a fun game that tests your knowledge of Roman numerals. With two modes – a randomizer and a challenge you can participate in – you’ll learn to convert numbers visually in minutes.

Itmeo Market

Itmeo Market is a new online graphics marketplace with exclusive and ready-to-use templates for a variety of projects. Templates include elements for logos, UI kits, graphic elements, Instagram templates, landing pages, and more. (This is a paid/subscription-based resource.)

Bellmoco Handcola

Bellmoco Handcola is a beautiful decorative typeface with fun swashes and serifs. The free version is for personal use only.

Bondie

Bondie is a handmade brush typeface with fills in many of the letterforms. It contains 106 characters and is free for personal use.

Bovino

Bovino has multiple weights that can work for display or body text. The modern serif is free for personal use.

Estilistica

Estilistica is a thin modern style sans serif with smooth lines and a vertical profile. It is best suited for display use and is free for personal use.

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Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

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IoT for Around the House: Sensors, MongoDB, and REST API on Onesait Platform (Part 3)

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And so we arrive to the third and -for now- last entry in our adventure about connecting a sensor at home and sending the measurements to the Onesait Platform.

In the first entry, we saw how to choose the working environment and set up both the ontology and the API service to ingest the data. In the second part, I told you how to hook the cables between the boards, how to configure the Arduino IDE to work, how to write the code that collects and sends the measurements to the Platform, and how to see that it was indeed received correctly.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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Lesson Learned on Groovy

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Though I have worked on Java for more than a decade, I have not had a chance to work on Groovy. While working for API Integration into Jenkins CI/CD pipeline, I extensively used Groovy to invoke REST API, validate the user input parameters, and business logic for that. After that, I found that Groovy is a fascinating program language for Java developers.

Why Is Groovy Easy for Java Developers?

It allows to use the Java syntax liberally and tries to be as natural as possible for Java developers. It is an object-oriented dynamic programming language for Java virtual machine (JVM) and can be integrated smoothly with any Java Program. The groovy syntax is lucid, familiar, and direct that makes to develop projects faster and easier. It demands a shorter learning curve for Java Developer to develop, test, and integrate to make production-ready code in a short span.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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Real-Time Stock Data Using Marketplace’s API

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In this time of global economic turmoil, it’s more important than it’s ever been that your financial decisions are based on accurate, up-to-date, market information.

In a world where stock price is a key confidence marker, the businesses that attract attention, secure investment, and grow, are the ones that can demonstrate their value in a wider market.

Up to now, displaying accurate market pricing has been prohibitively expensive, needing direct access to a huge dataset, and the code to mine it. So we’re delighted to introduce marketstack, a real-time market data API that’s reliable, simple to integrate with your site or app, is lightning fast, and includes a free-forever plan.

What is marketstack?

marketstack is a REST API that allows you to access stock data for public companies at 72 global exchanges including the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and the London Stock Exchange.

marketstack delivers real-time market data, accurate to a single minute, ensuring that the information you base your decisions on, and the information you pass on to your customers, is always up to date.

There are more than 125,000 stock tickers, from over 50 different countries; you can query stocks, or over 75 different market indices; intraday market data is included, meaning you can monitor trades that close at the end of the day; you can even retrieve data about time-zones and international currencies.

Why Choose marketstack

marketstack uses cutting-edge technology to deliver market data in an easy-to-integrate JSON format, which is lightweight and incredibly easy to dig into.

Requests are made via a simple HTTP GET call, and all requests are run through bank-quality 256-bit HTTPS encryption. Whatever code stack you’re using, whether it’s PHP, Python, Node, or plain old JavaScript, marketstack provides comprehensive documentation to get your team up to speed in mere minutes.

The highly reliable cloud infrastructure can handle anything from a few dozen requests per year, all the way up to millions of requests per day. Regardless of the scale of your project, marketstack is robust and flexible enough to handle it.

It’s Not Just About Money

marketstack isn’t just about the bulls and bears of markets, in the tech sector specifically, stock price is an indicator of wider business trends and performance.

When Apple became the first US company to reach a $2 trillion valuation, not only was its stock price central to the story, but it indicated a trend in the tech giant’s dominance that went beyond cold hard cash.

When an eccentric billionaire makes outrageous, and ill-judged comments, and tanks his company’s valuation, the fluctuations in stock price are a big part of the story.

Beyond the spin of politicians, the market index of different exchanges is an indication of what analysts with in-depth knowledge really think during an election campaign.

With over 30 years of historical data, marketstack is a history of business, particularly the burgeoning tech sector, and makes that history available with a simple to use API.

marketstack’s Rock Solid API

marketstack’s API is built on top of apilayer technology, one of the most respected, and trusted API providers in the world, with a huge amount of experience delivering data reliably. Millions of API requests can be run through the API hourly, and it still has almost 100% uptime.

Any API is only as good as the data it supplies, and marketstack’s data is supplied by numerous high-authority providers around the globe, resulting in unprecedented accuracy.

As a result, marketstack is trusted by over 30,000 companies — including Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, and Credit Suisse — and 80+ universities.

Getting Started with marketstack

marketstack is entirely free for up to 1000 requests per month, with access to 1 year of historical data, as well as end-of-day data. No credit card is required to get started, and you’ll never be billed. This is the perfect option for simple integrations, or developers working on proof-of-concept builds. What we really like about marketstack is that the free package is genuinely usable. It’s not just a trial version that presses you into upgrading.

For anyone who needs more comprehensive data, packages that include market indices, technical support, and commercial use permissions, start at $9.99 per month, or just $7.99 per month when billed annually.

Head over the marketstack today to claim your free API key, and get started.

 

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of marketstack –]

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Benefits of Using the OpenAPI (Swagger) Specification for Your APIs

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With software products becoming just a bunch of micro-services and third-party APIs mashed together, it’s more crucial than ever to get their structure in order.

GraphQL already did this at its inception by coming up with a whole specification that describes how APIs of its type should behave. In the RESTful API landscape, things were a bit more wild west. However, even if not all backend devs know it, there are a number of specifications for REST APIs as well.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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Give me 10 Cappuccinos and I’ll turn you into a 10x Software Developer

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The difference between a junior and a senior software developer is 90% their toolset. A senior will choose better tools, because of his experience, and as a result, he or she will deliver better results. This is why most senior software developers have an arsenal of libraries, frameworks, and tools, he or she is using – Because the senior will do anything possible to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Honorable mentions here can be found below.

  • Entity Framework for .Net Core
  • Refit for .Net Core
  • Angular
  • React
  • Etc, etc, etc …

But also commercial tools such as SonarCube and Bugsnag can be listed here.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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Translate your Enterprise apps in 1 second

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I must have seen dozens of implementations of this exact same web app during my 25 years as an Enterprise developer. And to be honest with you, I’m tired of implementing the exact same app, over and over again. "Don’t reinvent the wheel" comes to mind. Hence, I decided I wanted to create a "micro service web app", providing me with all translation features I could possibly need in the future. And more interestingly, I will create the entire app, in 1 second, by simply clicking a button. If you don’t believe me, feel free to watch the following YouTube video, where I demonstrate how I solve all my translations needs, for the rest of my life, in 1 second.

The SQL script I am starting out with can be found below.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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Grab Free SSL Certificates From ZeroSSL

Like it or not, we’re slowly edging towards a two-tier web: those sites that are secure, and…everything else.

There was a time on the web, when we didn’t have SSL certificates, and lots of people’s data got stolen. To address the problem, and regain users’ trust SSL certificates were introduced to secure sites handling sensitive data. And because they were initially a niche technology, you paid through the nose for them.

(An SSL certificate, for those that don’t know, is the difference between http:// and https://)

Then, thanks in part to privacy initiatives, and in part to high-profile data breaches, a few big players decided that all data should be protected. And the next thing you know, Google’s using SSL certificates as a ranking factor. And then suddenly browsers are warning people that non-SSL certified sites are insecure and they should “Get Out of Here!” And before long your hobby blog about cat-friendly board games is being billed hundreds of dollars a year just to be seen on the web.

Choosing whether to jump on the SSL bandwagon is simple: you have to have one. Finding an affordable SSL certificate, now that’s a challenge.

Most hosting companies will provide you with an SSL certificate as an add-on, and they’ll charge you anything up to $200 per year for it.

That’s why we’re blown away by ZeroSSL, because ZeroSSL is the first practical opportunity to grab an SSL certificate for your site, for free!

Get an SSL Certificate for Free

Now, it must be said that ZeroSSL isn’t the first place to offer a free SSL certificate. Plenty of hosts offer a “free” SSL certificate for the first year, when you pay for premium hosting. And there’s Let’s Encrypt which offers free certificates if you can work out how to access them.

ZeroSSL is just the first place to offer a genuinely free SSL certificate that you don’t need a post-grad degree in server engineering in order to use.

Get a Free SSL Certificate from ZeroSSL

Using ZeroSSL’s free-forever plan you can register three 90-day certificates entirely free. You’ll never need to pay for them, just renew every few months.

ZeroSSL also offers a variety of packages for simplifying your SSL management. The Basic package for example starts at $8/month and offers unlimited 90-day certificates, and even three 1-year certificates so you can renew annually and forget about them the rest of the time.

ZeroSSL also scales; if you need unlimited 1-year certificates — because you have, erm, unlimited websites? — that’s possible too.

Where ZeroSSL Excels

ZeroSSL offers a number of benefits over its competitors.

Firstly there’s the full-featured management console, that makes SSL management transparent. It sounds like a little thing, but with many other suppliers the first thing you know about your SSL certificate expiring is your site breaking.

ZeroSSL…makes managing your certificates…insanely easy.

ZeroSSL has an easy-to-use REST API, which can be used with the language of choice: PHP, Ruby, ASP, anything. It makes managing your certificates for multiple sites insanely easy.

Verifying SSL certificates can be confusing, and technically difficult. But ZeroSSL streamlines the process with automatic CSRs and one-step email validation (even for multiple domains) — considerably faster and easier than industry standard DNS validation. There’s even a one-click check to make sure your certificate is installed correctly.

Most importantly, ZeroSSL offers superb technical support on all of its paid plans. So if you’re one of the many people who started reading this post without fully understanding what an SSL certificate is, you can be confident that if you run into difficulties getting set up, there’s someone available 24/7 to dig you out of the hole.

Getting Started with ZeroSSL

If by now you’re planning to try ZeroSSL, the best place to start is the free-forever plan. ZeroSSL allows you to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time, so it makes sense to start with the no-credit-card option and upscale if you need it.

Using ZeroSSL’s dashboard you can create a free 90-day SSL certificate in minutes, and the step-by-step installation instructions will guide you all the way through.

ZeroSSL’s 1-year certificates are the gold-standard of SSL protection

ZeroSSL auto-generates certificates in different formats depending on your choice of platform, to speed up installation.

You can register certificates for multiple domains — you will have to verify each domain individually, but it’s simple to setup. Premium plan users can even use wildcards, allowing you to secure a site with multiple sub-domains, from a single certificate.

ZeroSSL’s 1-year certificates are the gold-standard of SSL protection and are the option that most site owners will come to rely on.

If you’re running an agency and you’re responsible for maintaining multiple client sites, ZeroSSL is made for you. ZeroSSL’s dashboard gives you one central location to monitor the status of all of your SSL certificates, and you can set expiry reminders to notify you by email when a certificate is about to expire.

Automated SSL Renewal with ZeroSSL

If that sounds too much work, and you’d like to automate your SSL certificates, ZeroSSL has you covered.

ZeroSSL works with both its own dedicated ACME Certbot, and more than ten other third-party ACME clients to fully automate your SSL certificates absolutely free, on a rolling 90-day schedule.

If you really know what you’re doing, you might even consider the ZeroSSL’s REST API. It enables certificate creation, validation, renewal, and management using HTTPS Get calls and JSON responses. The API handles millions of requests per month using 256-bit bank-level HTTPS encryption. You can access the API for free, and the Pro plan offers unlimited access.

Go Get Certified

There are millions of sites that drop traffic every month because they lack an SSL certificate.

Whatever your site, it’s not a question of whether you need an SSL certificate, it’s how you can affordably manage to create, install, and monitor a certificate.

ZeroSSL solves all of the problems of SSL certificate management, and for the majority of users, its free-forever plan is all you’ll ever need.

Head over to zerossl.com today to boost your traffic with a free SSL certificate.

 

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of ZeroSSL –]

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Surprisingly Simple Tools to Help You Smash API-First Approach

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API-First is an approach of defining your API specification before jumping into the development phase. With an API-first approach, instead of starting with code, you could start with design, planning, mocks, and tests.

By choosing an API-First approach, teams can crystallize their vision before development, removing the unnecessary complexity in implementation to deliver a resourceful, smart API that can no only keep R&D costs low, but has the ability to meet today’s modern IT landscape where a single operation to query several systems and components to get the job done. The specification is shared internally, as a general to-do list for the project teams to work on independently.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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Automate CRUD Operations and Focus on What Matters

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I have written about Magic here previously, but on the 5th of January we came out with a significant upgrade to the Magic wand — the ability to automatically scaffold up an entire Angular frontend. This means that you can now start out with only a database, click one button, and Magic creates your entire backend. The result is that every single database table becomes wrapped inside of CRUD HTTP REST endpoints. Click another button, and Magic gives you a ZIP file that contains an entire Angular frontend, tailored specifically to your backend. See the process in the video below, or download Magic and try it out on your own database if you wish.

According to an article I read here at DZone, a highly skilled software developer can produce roughly 750 lines of code per month. When I tested Magic on a database with 122 tables, Magic produced almost 100,000 lines of code for me automatically. That becomes the equivalent of 8.8 years of software development for a human being, and my computer created this code in less than 60 seconds. Add to that the fact that human beings will write an occasional error into their code, and a computer will never create an error — and you get the point.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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