Stay in the move with your wireless keyboard and iPad, and keep you clients happy and development running smoothly.  Gusto offers site management, coding environment and FTP in one package.  It’s a bit like Coda for Mobile.  In fact, I was looking for Coda, which wasn’t there (Let’s go Panic!) and found this instead, which actually looks just as sweet.

Some Features?

• Code Syntaxing,
• Site Management,
• Previews,
• FTP

Most of what you would expect!  But don’t take our word for it, go to visit the Gusto Website and find out more.

We’ll be taking a closer look at this handy looking IDE for mobile development over the coming months, let’s just say it’s in the labs folder for now while we test it out.

Here at D2T we don’t believe too much in IDEs, preferring always to hand-code and understand the hard code – but sometimes these IDEs can be helpful for launching demo sites, or quick-launching prototypes.  So it’s worth taking a look around to see what’s happening.

At first glance the ApplicationCraft team have a nice, cloud-based IDE which seems to perform “a la dreamweaver”.  A very complete development environment with visual and code views and a whole bunch of handy components, which are called Widgets.  Also included in the IDE are some useful user permissions and access levels, which is great for collaborative development.

“Download” it for yourselves and take a look at their Video introduction guides for a quick overview of what you can achieve.

Here is the link to ApplicationCraft website.

So what’s in each create?  That depends on the month, which is kinda nice.  But generally it’s stuffed with quality vector goodies like Icons, Avatars, Textures (Seamless of course), Seamless Patterns, Fonts, Brushes, Styles…  All signed and sealed by Ryan himself.

Great idea, great products – which is why we like to promote him through this post. So go rate his great crates – here is the link:

Illustrator Vector resources by Vectormill

Colour lovers is well known among veteran designers, but for newbies out there who may not have experienced the epiphany that is ColourLovers - I post this for you.

Tired of fiddling with HSB sliders?  Take some inspiration from, literally, countless palettes designed by colour-mad-freaks like me and you.

Best thing to do is take the tour – Create and Name a Colour (how fun is that?).  Then make a palette from that colour and others (this can take time) and name that sucker too!  Your very own palette, named and framed in glory.  The fun doesn’t stop there – from your palette create a pattern and from that order a framed work or fabric.  Absolute design heaven/madness!

Enough raving, I haven’t time to write more because I have to get back on there and design some more palettes.  See you there (follow D2T studio).

I’ve just run a quick lab test on Seamless Studio by ColourLovers (you know who THEY are, right?).  Prepare for long evenings designing palettes in ColourLovers (subject of my next post) and then designing patterns in their Seamless Studio App.

There’s not too much to tell – clearly it’s a focussed software!  You build your palette and you use the handy Studio tools to draw your pattern.  Wavy lines, boxes, symbols – all the tools are there – just slap ‘em in, arrange them and let seamless take care of the overlap and export.  Sweet!

I thought creating patterns was great – then I started building palettes for them in Colour Lovers website – which is the subject of my next post.  Read on, McDuff!

The aim of this blog is offer to our readers insights from the field of, mainly, Website Design and Development. Our mandate is simple: we research and discover new tools and developments online, and we share them with you.  What we stick in our “labs” folder – we share with you.

Today we decided to install the Disqus plugin to replace the humble WordPress Comments system – which is perfectly fine and excellent of course – but the D2T remit is to research, test and review the tools available to website owners.

Looking at the Disqus platform from outside, it looks like a supercharged comments form neatly built and maintained.  And it is!  Installing is a cinch:  The plugin is well-developed, tidy and with a clean and handy interface.  It integrates tightly with the Disqus website of course, and they guarantee WordPress comments are not lost, they are in fact “synced” with the Disqus servers (consider your privacy issues there).

One of the better facets of this tool is that, thanks to the Disqus platform tools, we get not only a great comments platform, but effectively an efficient Community Management Platform – so in demand in these social times.

For now it’s in the labs category.  We’ll run it for a while and see how it holds up, then finish up this review.  We are sure the plugin is great in terms of professional quality,  so have no hesitation in testing it yourselves on your own weblog or webpage.  Great for customer support.

You will find all you need here on the Disqus website.

Apart from a nifty interface, LittleSnapper (link below) will grab areas, windows and entire webpages (through its built in web browser).  Then you can sort them into collections, edit, tag, rename, export – generally all the usual functions and then some.

Plus LittleSnapper can upload straight to FTP or other Cloud software services.  Used to be Ember, for which I opened an account, then they closed it (shame).

If you are looking for mac screen-grab software – get yours here: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/littlesnapper/

What’s so good about it?  You may or may not know that when you install, and uninstall, programs on your computer a whole bunch of junk is installed, and not uninstalled, alongside it.  Cleanmymac ensures all this extra junk is flushed away alongside the uninstall.

Caches – where are they?  Clean ‘em out.  Do you know what Universal Binaries are?  Clean ‘em out.  Plus Logs and unused Language Files – get rid of ‘em, you (probably) don’t need ‘em.

Plus it cleans out a bunch of other system junk like trashes (you don’t know what they are?) and probably some other acronyms and extensions; I’m not going to go into a list here – take a look at the software itself (link below).

All I say is: If you can’t be bothered to dig around inside folders to gain a few gigs then install this:  Oh, and here is the link:

Clean My Mac

Nb: It’s not free – which is why it’s good.  But it’s worth it!

Web designers shouldn’t need to take care of technical issues – but it often happens.  And email delivery is simply not any fun if anything is going wrong.  What we need is a simple, visual tool to track those bulk (not to say Spam) email messages.  In steps Postmark.

So what does it do?

In the words of the authors:

Postmark enables web applications of any size to deliver and track transactional email reliably, with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.We’re the experts at getting your emails to the inbox, so you don’t have to be.

In designer language: they do the dirty work and you watch the resulting charts, then show them to your client claiming fame and fortune.

Postmark is all goodness.  Oh and here is the link.

The long and the short of this simple, but effective, app is that it allows the designer to slow down the cursor speed to “bullet time” when needed, for that extra precision.  As I said, this is a short post.

Furthermore, and mainly the reason I am posting about Finaltouch, is the juicy website design!  Don’t miss it.  This blog is not necessarily a design gallery – but inspiration is to be shared.

So here is the Finaltouch website link – go take a look.

For an overview of what modern web design techniques are all about take a look at the Adobe Expressive Web (site) here (currently beta so that link might change – but I am sure Adobe will do a 301 on it – right, Adobe?).

HTML5, CSS3 techniques and some pretty nifty responsive design (try shrinking your browser to see how the page reorganises the info) are inspiration to any progressive web bod.

All we need now are the right clients to pitch too.

Browse, catalog, and plug-in all kinds of font goodness into your website with minimum effort, maximum enjoyment.  Just how designers like it.  Sound like I’m freaking out over it?  Just try it out for yourself – get your font on here at Typekit

Free kits are available but you’ll be limited to fewer font plugins in your catalog and also have a promotional tag in the bottom-right hand corner of your site (see below!  I’m such a cheapo).

The goodness doesn’t even end there – once I figure out how to use the fricking selectors in the typekit I don’t know what will happen to my blood-pressure.  Anyone got the skinny on this let me know, I simply don’t have the time to fuss right now – jeez I haven’t even enabled the comment form – so Twit me up until I do!

Typekit has recently been bought out by Adobe – the all consuming web monster (love you really!) – so let’s just hope Typekit stays as Typekit does.

I’ll leave you without a witty one line last phrase, so common to copywriters to whom it comes so naturally.

The Pro of this equation is that Cloudflare promises to – and I quote:

…optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources.

The Quo of the equation is that all our web traffic is diverted through these guys, perforce.  What this might actually mean is something I am still pondering.  But in the meantime I have gratefully accepted Mediatemple’s offer of easy-integration (one click install! Love you guys) and placed it on a test site beta.  We’ll see what happens.

Mediatemple acolytes will find Cloudflare automatically available for automagic installation in their control panel. Otherwise non (mt) bods will find Cloudflare here.

NB: I saw some reports of issues with CNAMEs and other custom DNS configurations – just a heads-up.

At the moment it’s in the Labs folder being tested – so maybe I’ll update this post later.  In the meantime I post the link for other designers and developers so we can all share the love: Email Newsletter Boilerplate Download Page Here

This boilerplate comes courtesy of Emailology (see link above).  The design of the website itself is pretty nifty – I somehow feel a nice blue would just have suited better – and maybe I would beautify the branding “Email on Acid” – but that’s just me.

Great work guys!  Thanks for sharing!

Currently in Beta so be aware of the bugs (and bees), but drop it in your labs folder and line up the apps with this amazing little tool.  Here is the download link: http://listjs.com/

“Do you want a 7 KB cross-browser native JavaScript that makes your plain HTML lists super flexible, searchable, sortable and filterable? Yeah!  Do you also want the possibility to add, edit and remove items by dead simple templating? Hell yeah!” – jList website (couldn’t have said it better)

Secondly, hats off to the fantastic campaign creative – not sure who is responsible for such a great image but let’s follow them on Twitter for inspiration!  Really nice work.

Without going into enormous detail about it’s simplicity and seamless background backup (we are plugging this program but unfortunately no affiliate linking will win us any passive income – listening Haystack?) we will simply point you to the website and confidently state: this is simply the best backup software for Mac owners… period.

http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

iPhone users can also get double the pleasure by installing the app and syncing the information direct to your portable “Chum” (i.e. iPhone).

TripIt | Online travel itinerary and trip planner.

UPDATE:

Since we looked at CSS Edit, which is was a pretty nifty tool for quick CSS editing, visually – and great for sorting into groups!  It seems MacRabbit has bundled all their apps into Espresso – their own HTML/CSS file editing software.

We will take a look at Espresso in another post.  At the moment we use Coda, so a face-off between the two would be a pretty interesting post.

In the meantime follow the link to take a look yourselves.

http://macrabbit.com/espresso/

One interesting stats product we did find, which, incidentally, also has a freebie package (to keep up with Google on the value front) was GetClicky.

GetClicky has some neat functions which Google does not (like Twitter stats and a whole bunch more), but what we like is that it basically shakes up the data in a nice and friendly way and allows us simply to just get a fresh view on the (pretty much) same stats.

Go check it out.

UPDATE:

Chrome is clearly now available on the Mac – and a great, great browser it is too.  We use it as a secondary browser for running Google accounts – primary browser being Safari at the moment.  Firefox has slipped a little down the browser list for being too damned heavy!