Bootstrap (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/) is really helpful. I am already using it in 3-4 of my projects and my friends are starting using it too.
I have been using 960.gs and I had rolled some of my own css styles for text and other formatting, but Bootstrap has already taken care of all of that, and it looks great. There are example layouts included as well.
A nice list, but I can't be the only person here that is trying to speed up my page-load time and reduce the number of development tools that I depend on. Which would make a smaller shortlist?
I guess it depends on what you need. Most of them are helpers to create quick applications, ideal for startup and prototypes. Writing less code also mean writing less bugs. When I create a stylesheet, it may take a while to get feedback if it doesn't work on a obscure browser version while a bug in Twitter's bootstrap will be detected (and probably fixed) a lot sooner.
speed up my page-load time and reduce the number of development tools that I depend on
Most people like to speed up their page-load time, but reducing the number of tools you rely on seems a strange thing to do (unless it is some kind of enforce-artificial-constraints thing).
A good craftsperson knows their tools well, and knows which tool to use where. Reducing the number of tools seems artificially limiting.
Knowing tools takes time. And it seems like every week I'm hearing about some great new dev tool. Do folks actually try all of these? It seems you'd be perpetually at the base of the learning curve if you did.
And it seems like every week I'm hearing about some great new dev tool.
True
Do folks actually try all of these?
No
Hearing about something is a data point. Hearing about the same thing, multiple times, from multiple sources you trust is a sign you should try something.
Great post .. quite a few new ones I haven't heard before. We were curating a similar list before a hackathon, and couldn't help wondering if there is a distro/vmware image that specifically targets web-dev - just ready to go with tools for @dot_cloud, appengine, heroku, all browser comparability testing - all rolled in. You know like backtrack, but for a web developer ... Anybody know if such a thing exists?
Google Chrome deserves an honorable mention here. I just found out yesterday that chrome's built-in debugger has stack traces. I've been debugging for years with firefox/firebug and forgot how helpful it is to actually know where the source of your bug is.
Misleading title, this is just a cool list of cool tools, most of which aren't particularly oriented productivity (anymore than any tool is). IMO productivity tools are ones that help you do your existing task in essentially the same way but faster.
These tools all work in different ways, but I would love if someone could write an app store for these (and others) to live in so we could one-click install and one-click uninstall dev tools locally. I'd definitely pay for that manager app, and it'd be way easier to give micro-donations to open source tools we use a lot.
I think Ender seems to fit the bill pretty well. Being a package manager for JS[1], it allows you to download and manage dependencies for each project. A bit like PEAR or CPAN or NPM or whatever, with some client side stuff to manage those dependencies in the browser. That's what I got from a quick scan, anyway.
These things are trivial to use for even the most inexperienced CLI user, mind, so something like this would likely do well for you.
I like the idea of it so I'm going to float it at work and see what people think.
It's not quite the same idea, but WebPutty (www.webputty.net) targets a similar problem and works cross-platform (it's a web app).
WebPutty is a free CSS editing and hosting service that gives you a syntax-highlighting CSS editor, supports SCSS and Compass, and provides a side-by-side preview pane that's updated as you make changes to your CSS. It also enables instant publishing with minification, compression, and automatic cache control (if you chose to host your CSS with WebPutty).
Full disclosure: I'm one of WebPutty's developers.
