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🧰 50 Developer tools to make your life a little easier

Iain Freestone on July 27, 2020

Fifty (plus) applications, chrome extensions, web apps, and everything in between that will hopefully come in handy at some point in your programmi...
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Kilian Valkhof

Hey Iain, that's a great list! I noticed you missed an "n" at the end of #40, "JSON Web Toke_n_"

I'd love for you to check out Polypane. It's an app that I've been building for the past few years. It's similar to sizzy and responsively (your #2 and #21), except it does way more and has been around for a bit longer than both. It replaces all these items on your list too:

7. CSS Scan: In Polypane you can select any element and copy all the CSS with a single click, or just the CSS for a specific selector
13. Window Resizer: Polypane doesn't just show devices like other multi-pane browser, but it also parses your CSS, extracts your responsive breakpoints and makes screens from that.
16. AXE: There's a built-in accessibility panel that highlights any issues with a page, making it really easy to find and fix issues.
18. Contrast checker: Polypane's built-in contrast checker finds all contrast issues on a page and also suggest improved colors for each. I also made a free online contrast checker that implements the same technology.
46. Who can use: We implement over a dozen different "overlays" that let you check a website for various types of color blindness but also other visual impairments like glaucoma or situational ones like bright sunlight.
49. Metatags: Polypane has a "meta panel", that shows you all the relevant meta tags (making it really easy to see often overlooked typos and missing info) but also renders pixel perfect previews for Facebook, Twitter, Slack, LinkedIn, Discord and Google results. This took a lot of work to get right, but it's still the only meta preview that gets all the rendering right.

Lastly, if you want something like 45. Screen size map but for your own site, check out visualize browser sizes, which can generate something like that based on your site's Google Analytics!

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Iain Freestone

Hi Kilian

Thank you, I had not come across Polypane before but I have just installed the 14 day free trial and I am very impressed. I also like that I can use on 3 devices, this is something I miss with Sizzy. I will try using Polypane for the next 14 days and see how I get on.

I have added your tool to the list.

For reference to others here is a screen shot with the some of the same devices as my other screen shot.

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Iain Freestone

The overlay features in Polypane are fantastic!

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madza profile image
Madza • Edited

Has anyone tried Sizzy? Thoughts?

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Iain Freestone

Hi,

I use Sizzy a lot and from my list it one of the few I use on a daily basis. It has some great features and gets updated regularly. I was dubious at first with the monthly cost but I would say I definitely get good value for money. The photo studio feature is also great for screenshots.

For reference, this is how mine is setup but you can have as many or few devices as you want.

alt text

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Arthur Henrique

Right! From the quoted list this one caught my attention more, seems to be very useful

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Madza

thanks, might try out in future :)

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Al Romano

Have a paid plan and use it daily for front-end development. It's got some nifty features I haven't found in other places. I use the Style Debugging feature all the time.

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Neelam

Thanks a bunch, Iain. I'm going to use some of these now! 😍😊

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Eldin Zaimovic

Shieldfy is shutting down, Read more here.

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krutikkhatri

Hii
You can checkout this onlinebase64tools.org/ for base64 to json,yaml,xml,csv,javascript,html,string,encoder,decoder,images.
It's free do checkout for more information.

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Mohammad Javed

Awesome list! I'll definitely be using some of them! Thank you.

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Liviu Lupei

How do you test on Internet Explorer and Safari?