Downloadable Tools

written by: Jeff McNear

GUI tools for for those who would rather not use the command line

  • KOALA => http://koala-app.com/
    In order to get SASS compiling to work Ruby needs to be installed (often already included in a Mac) along with the SASS Ruby gem. Koala is a free open source compiler which has all of the necessary tools built right into the system – so you can install KOALA and get to work right away
  • SOURCETREE => https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/
    A great version control GUI that can use either Git or Mecurial methods
  • GITKRAKEN => https://www.gitkraken.com/
    very similar to sourcetree
  • BITBUCKET => https://bitbucket.org/
    Github alternative from Atlassian which plays quite nicely with SourceTree and which allows for private repositories without a fee
  • BULK RENAME UTILITY => http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php
    This tool allows you to select a folder in your file system and execute find and replace commands so as to eliminate illegal characters and spaces in file names

WEBSITE SPIDERING TOOLS

Downloadable tools that are great to have around

  • EVERNOTE => https://evernote.com/
    This is a terrific way to keep track of notes which allows access to those notes either locally or in the cloud which means that multiple devices can have access to the same group of notes. Firefox and Chrome have browser extensions which allow you to copy a webpage directly into a selected folder
  • SIMPLE NOTE => https://simplenote.com/
    Very similar to Evernote in many ways but from the folks at Automatic …. and including version control features!
  • SKITCH => http://download.cnet.com/Skitch-for-Windows/3000-12511_4-75835711.html
    This is a companion to evernote which allows you to grab a screenshot as well as crop and annotate it, still supported on a Mac here but the windows version still works just fine!
  • DUET DISPLAY => https://www.duetdisplay.com/
    A great little $10 app that lets you use an I-Pad as an external monitor on either Mac or PC
  • COLOR CONTRAST ANALYSIS TOOL => https://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrastanalyser/
    If you need to absolutely know that your color scheme will pass accessibility tests, download this tool
  • WEBSITE SPIDERING TOOL => Screaming Frog SEO Spider
    will crawl any website and come up with a list of pages, scripts, images and other resources