50 awesome new tools for developers in 2019
A fresh batch of tools you’ll want to consider for your projects.
Media tools
37. Orion Icon Library
Orion Icon Library is a massive set of more than 6,000 stunning SVG icons available as line, solid, colour and flat colour style. There are two plans to choose from: Free and Pro. The Pro plan doesn’t require any attribution, gives you access to over 2,000 new icons and provides library management options. (If that's not quite what you're after, you'll find lots more free icon sets here).
38. Frappe Charts
Delve into these simple, SVG charts that have no dependencies and are inspired by GitHub. Create line graphs, bar charts, pie charts and more, with hover effects for displaying information.
39. SVGator
An online SVG animation tool with a user-friendly interface. Enables you to import SVG, view and edit the code and use animation presets to animate before exporting a single ready-to-use SVG file.
40. ApexCharts
Use ApexCharts to create responsive, interactive, high-performance JavaScript charts to represent your data. Features annotations and animations, all built and customised using a simple API.
41. MapKit JS
If you need to include a map on a web page, you may as well make it interactive. This JavaScript library from Apple lets you do exactly that, in addition to using annotations and overlays. The service comes with a free daily limit of 250,000 map views and 25,000 service calls.
42. Img2
A JavaScript utility that automatically pre-caches images to improve page performance. Just swap out your <img /> elements with <img-2></img-2> and the utility does the caching work for you.
43. Lozad.js
A fast, light and configurable, vanilla JavaScript lazy loader with no dependencies that uses the IntersectionObserver API, for lazy loading images, iframes, ads, videos or any other element.
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Testing and data tools
44. webhint
A linting tool available as a CLI or, if you’re not sure what to check for, as an online scanner. When put to work, webhint scours through your code to make sure it follows best practices and also hits the right spot in terms of accessibility, speed, etc.
45. Airtap
Quickly test your JavaScript in more than 800 browsers. Airtap stands out from other cross-browser testers because you can run the different browsers without installing them locally.
46. mkcert
If you require SSL in a local development environment, this simple tool can whip up locally trusted SSL certificates using whatever names you’d like.
47. Puppeteer Recorder
A Chrome extension that records browser interactions such as clicks, typing and form interactions, before creating a script for Puppeteer (the popular headless Chrome testing API). You also have a chance to edit the generated code using the configuration options.
48. jsonstore.io
Web service that offers a free, secure and JSON-based cloud data store for small projects. Go to the site, copy the generated URL and start sending HTTP requests to communicate with your data store.
49. Initab
Not getting on with Chrome’s new tab page? Not a problem – replace it with a set of useful tools tailored to your programming needs. We’re talking GitHub/GitLab activity, Gists, Stack Overflow, a scratchpad for notes and more.
50. LambdaTest
If you’re going to test your websites and web apps, you may as well do it properly. This useful tool runs your public or locally hosted creations on over 2,000 mobile and desktop browsers that are running real operating systems. What’s more. the built-in debugging tools take care of any issues in real time.
This article was originally published in net, the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers. Buy issue 316 or subscribe.
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Louis is an author, speaker and frontend developer who’s been involved in the web development industry since 2000. He curates the popular newsletter Web Tools Weekly and blogs about code at Impressive Webs.