The look and feel of the web or mobile application are associated with the front-end development components. Be it the UI design of the action button, the transition effect or the web form design, such visual aesthetics are set up by the front-end developers.
Here, I will walk you through some tools and resources for front-end developers that might prove handy while designing for the web and mobile UX.
1. Sublime Text
It is a basic first-rate code editor that offers a well-efficient, and super fast user interface. The best part of Sublime is the program’s huge array of keyboard shortcuts. These shortcuts enhance the ability to perform concurrent editing and carrying out the same interactive changes to the multiple selected areas.
2. jQuery
JavaScript is undoubtedly a crucial front-end language by developers, although it suffers several browser inconsistencies and is a bit complicated.
It was 2006, when a fast, small and cross-platform JavaScript library saw an advent for easing the front-end process. By abstracting a number of functionality, which is left for developers to solve on their own, jQuery had a greater scope for adding plug-ins, creating animations, or even navigating documents.
And it won’t be incorrect to state that jQuery is by far the most popular JavaScript library having being installed on the 65% of the high traffic websites.
3. Chrome Developer Tools
Modern browsers incorporate built-in developer tools to help front-end developers edit HTML and CSS in real-time. Moreover, it helps debug your JavaScript and allows simultaneous viewing of your website.
Google Chrome Developer Tool is one of those useful tools that lets you do just that. Apart from this, a bunch of network tools helps optimize loading flows.
Must Read: 4 UI Design Tools You Can’t Do Without
4. GitHub
No developer would love to be screwed up while working on a development project. GitHub is one of the indispensable tools every front-end developer would love to have. With GitHub, you can view any changes made or review any previous change in your code.
The repository hosting service is a rich open-source development community that helps team collaborate and work as well as providing several other components such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project.
5. Twitter Bootstrap
Getting tired of typing in that same styling for a container? How about that button that keeps cropping up? Once you start building front-end applications regularly, you’ll start to notice the same patterns emerging.
UI frameworks are an attempt to solve the typing problems by abstracting the common elements into the reusable module which means developers can enhance the elements of the new applications with much ease.
Among all the frameworks, the most widely used are the Bootstrap framework- a comprehensive UI pack developed by Twitter. It also features a complete range of tools to help normalize stylesheets, create modal objects and add JavaScript plugins etc. Overall, bootstrap can help you dramatically save an ample of amount of time on a project.
6. Angular.js
HTML is the building block of any front-end developer’s toolbox. However, many find a major drawback in it: it was not designed to manage the dynamic views.
This is where AngularJS comes to the picture, an open-source web application framework. AngularJS is developed by Google and lets you extend your application’s HTML syntax resulting in a more readable, and quick to develop the environment which cannot be accomplished by HTML alone.
