Now, you might be thinking that setting up a chatbot sounds like a tech nightmare, especially if coding isn’t your thing. But don’t worry, it’s actually become quite easy. There are plenty of platforms out there now that let you whip up a chatbot without needing to be a tech whiz. We’re going to walk you through ten of these chatbot builders.

So, whether you’re just starting out and don’t know your HTML from your HTTP, or you’re a seasoned developer looking for advanced features, there’s definitely a chatbot builder out there that fits your need.

Overview:

Chatbot Tools: What Do They Do?

Imagine chatbots as your own team of digital helpers, ready to chat with your customers around the clock. They’re set up to field questions and guide users through your services with friendly, text-based conversations.

Chatbot tools – sometimes called chatbot builders – are the behind-the-scenes magic that lets you craft these chatty assistants to engage with visitors on your site or app. They’re like the directors teaching actors their lines, except the actors are chatbots that can talk to your visitors, answer their questions, and help them out with various tasks.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, or AI, these chatbot tools get better with time. It’s a bit like how a person gets better at their job the more they do it; these chatbots learn from chatting with lots of different people. So, the more they interact, the more helpful they become.

Take a chatbot in a store, for example – over time, it can learn the ins and outs of customer queries, from where to find products to when the store closes. It’s like having an ever-ready assistant who’s there to lend a hand whenever your customers need it.

Best Chatbot Tools to Try

Now, without further ado, here are some of the best chatbot tools I’ve come across, along with their prices and some of my thoughts on their pros and cons.

SunShine Conversations

Sunshine Conversations, formerly known as Smooch, is Zendesk’s platform designed to elevate customer interactions into personalized and engaging experiences. It enables businesses to seamlessly integrate their existing systems, providing a cohesive and efficient service that spans the entire customer journey. With advanced customization capabilities, companies can create unique interactions that allow customers to browse products, make bookings, and even complete payments within the conversation itself.

The platform’s strength lies in its unified API, which simplifies the integration process, allowing for a single setup to be deployed across various channels. This not only accelerates the time to market but also ensures that customers have a consistent experience, regardless of the platform they use.

Price:

Sunshine Conversations is included with any Zendesk plan, which starts at $44 per agent per month.

Chatfuel

Chatfuel is a chatbot platform ideal for e-commerce marketers looking to boost their presence on Facebook Messenger. It’s designed to enhance lead generation, facilitate upselling and cross-selling, and ultimately increase revenue. The platform’s recent integration with ChatGPT allows businesses to maximize their WhatsApp potential, offering a more engaging customer experience and fostering growth.

The platform simplifies the integration of various data sources, such as your store, CRM, or CDP, through the Chatfuel API. This integration enables a more streamlined messaging process, allowing for sophisticated audience segmentation and the delivery of personalized messages that truly resonate with customers.

Additionally, Chatfuel provides robust tools for real-time analytics, helping businesses track message performance and customer engagement, which are essential for optimizing messaging strategies and driving effective marketing decisions.

Price:

Chatfuel’s pricing begins at $14.40 per month, which includes 500 conversations. Additional conversations are charged at $0.03 each. It also offers a free 7-day trial.

Botsify

Botsify is a chatbot platform that helps businesses automate conversations with their customers. It’s like having a multilingual virtual assistant that can speak over 100 languages, making it easier to connect with customers from all over the world. The platform is designed to be a one-stop-shop for chat automation, offering easy integration with other systems and tools your website might use, which means less hassle for you in terms of setup and maintenance.

With Botsify, creating forms to gather leads is as simple as having a conversation. These forms feel more like chatting with a friend rather than filling out a boring form, making it more likely that visitors will engage and provide the information you need. Plus, if a customer needs to talk to a real person, the chatbot can hand off the conversation to a human agent, ensuring that personal touch when it’s most needed.

Price:

Botsify offers a plan starting at $49 per month, which includes 2 chatbots, support for up to 5,000 users per month, unlimited conversations, forms, and media, along with integration options for Messenger, SMS, Website, Instagram, and Telegram.

Messenger for Business

If your business thrives on Facebook, then “Messenger for Business” could be a game-changer for you. This Facebook chatbot bridges the gap between you and your audience, allowing seamless communication directly through your Facebook Business Page. Whether it’s a potential lead scrolling through your posts or a customer visiting your website, they can easily start a conversation with you via a handy chat plugin.

The best part? These chats are powered by Messenger from Meta, ensuring that the conversations are smooth and consistent.

The beauty of “Messenger for Business” lies in its ability to automate interactions without losing the personal touch. You can generate and nurture leads, handle queries, and follow up-all on autopilot with the option for live chat when needed. Customers get the benefit of instant communication without the dreaded wait times or the hassle of explaining their issue to multiple agents. Plus, the conversation history stays put in Messenger, making it a breeze for customers to pick up where they left off.

Setting up “Messenger for Business” is a breeze. Just activate Messenger on your business page, pop a ‘Send Message’ button on your profile, and you’re good to go. You can even welcome event guests to message you and set up automated responses to instantly reply, send away messages, answer FAQs, and convert post comments into conversations. It’s all about keeping the engagement high and the responses swift, helping you connect with your customers more effectively.

Price:

Messenger for Business is free.

Telegram Bots

The Telegram chat app isn’t just for messaging; it’s got its own clever chatbot feature too. Imagine having a little helper in your chats that can do all sorts of neat tricks, from running mini-apps in JavaScript to handling payments from folks in over 200 countries.

These bots are like Swiss Army knives for your productivity, ready to tackle tasks like file conversions, chat management, or even telling you if you’ll need an umbrella for the day. You can chat with these bots one-on-one, or bring them into group chats and channels to add some extra pizzazz and functionality.

What’s more, Telegram bots play nice with other services. There’s a whole bunch of official bots for popular platforms that make it super easy to pull in content or do quick searches without leaving the app. For the gamers out there, developers can whip up engaging HTML5 games, from solo adventures to multiplayer challenges, right within Telegram. And for the social butterflies, bots can help you link up with new friends who share your interests, find local events, or even trade second-hand treasures.

Setting up a basic Telegram bot is a breeze, but if you want to give it some extra oomph and tailor it to do more complex stuff, you might need to roll up your sleeves and get familiar with some programming. But don’t worry, a little coding can go a long way in making your bot truly yours.

Price:

Telegram Bots is free.

Botkit

Botkit is like a toolbox for anyone wanting to build chatbots. It’s a piece of the Microsoft Bot Framework and is all about helping developers whip up bots, apps, and various integrations for popular messaging platforms such as Slack, Google Hangouts, Twilio, and Facebook Messenger.

What sets Botkit apart is its user-friendly approach. It’s designed to handle the complex bits of messaging APIs, allowing developers to focus on crafting their bot’s personality and capabilities. This means less time fussing over technical details and more time bringing creative ideas to life.

When you create a bot with Botkit, you’re equipping it with the conversational chops that mimic human interaction. Your bot will be able to ‘listen’ to users, ‘say’ things in return, and ‘reply’ to keep the conversation flowing.

This trio of skills enables developers to create bots that are not just functional but also engaging, capable of handling a chat as smoothly as a human would.

Price:

Telegram Bots is free.

The post Best Tools to Build Your Own Chatbots (2024) appeared first on Hongkiat.

Thankfully, there are lots of top-notch tools out there these days that help you spot and fix any app issues super fast. We’re here to share a bunch of these awesome tools that help you gather and sort out bugs in no time.

You can catch these bugs by getting the scoop directly from your users or your team, or by watching how folks use your app. Doing this squashes bugs, makes your app nicer to use, and keeps your customers happy.

Read Also:  Best Websites to Test Your Codes Online

1. Bugherd

Imagine if your clients could report a bug without having to fill out long forms or make complicated screenshots. That’s where Bugherd comes in. It lets you add feedback right on your site, so you can see and sort out bugs in a snap.

With Bugherd, when clients point out issues by marking them on your site, it turns their notes into a detailed report that helps you fix things fast.

All your users need is a guest pass to spot, click, and explain any bugs they run into, and voilà, a report is ready for you to tackle.

Plus, Bugherd plays nice with lots of other apps you might be using, like Jira, Basecamp, and Zapier. But it’s not just for feedback; it’s also great for team collaboration and managing tasks.

2. Doorbell

Doorbell makes it super easy to collect feedback right inside your app on the web, iOS, or Android – and it’s free. It sorts all the feedback you get by using sentiment analysis to tell if comments are thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Plus, you can make your own labels to organize messages and look through them all with a quick text search.

It works smoothly with tools like Pivotal Tracker, Asana, Jira, and lots of other project management and bug tracking apps. Just zap your customer’s comments straight into whichever system you’re using to stay on top of things.

And getting Doorbell running in your app is a breeze with JavaScript, iOS, and Android SDKs.

3. Usersnap

Usersnap is a dream come true for anyone working on web projects who needs a visual bug tracking system. It’s your one-stop-shop for organizing feedback and bug reports.

This tool empowers your users to report bugs right where they find them, with easy-to-use point-and-click annotation tools, all without having to leave your website for a separate bug reporting app.

No matter if you’re a fan of Agile, Scrum, or Waterfall methodologies, Usersnap fits into your workflow. It integrates with popular tools like Zendesk, Slack, Asana, and others.

It also helps streamline communication between your designers, developers, quality assurance team, and customers.

4. Jira

Jira is well-known among Agile teams for its ability to help plan and craft outstanding products, keeping a close eye on tasks and the entire development journey.

This comprehensive tool boasts features such as adaptable planning, precise estimations, prioritization focused on value, transparent execution, measurable outcomes, and room for growth. It’s designed to manage tasks, delegate work, monitor team progress, and much more.

With Jira, you can boost your team’s efficiency by analyzing the live visual data from reports. Plus, you can customize Jira with various add-ons.

It also syncs seamlessly with tools you may already use, like Confluence and Bitbucket. After a 7-day free trial, pricing starts at $10 per month for small teams and goes up to $75 for larger teams.

5. Rollbar

Rollbar is designed to help you swiftly discover bugs in your web application and enables you to address them proactively. This tool highlights errors by gathering extensive context data such as detailed stack traces, request parameters, URLs, environments, user impact, and more.

It sorts errors according to their underlying causes, allowing you to pinpoint the exact issues in your app.

Setting up error alerts is straightforward with options for email or integration with third-party services like Slack or HipChat. Rollbar supports many popular programming languages and frameworks.

It offers libraries for Ruby, Python, PHP, Node.js, JavaScript, Android, iOS, and even Flash. For a custom setup, you can make use of the Rollbar RESTful API.

6. CheckMarket

Formerly known as Promoter, CheckMarket enables you to gather customer feedback and analyze it effectively through Net Promoter Campaigns.

Its user-friendly web-based interface allows for easy creation and management of feedback campaigns, deep analysis of customer feedback, and customer contact management.

CheckMarket’s Net Promoter System provides clear, actionable insights, highlighting precise areas for action to achieve immediate and measurable growth. It offers a unified platform for engaging customers and bolstering their loyalty without the need for multiple systems.

7. Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an intuitive issue tracking application that aids in monitoring project progression and enhancing team collaboration while maintaining focus on key tasks.

It simplifies the process of creating and tagging issues, while also automatically categorizing them for ease of management. Lighthouse integrates seamlessly with Tender’s customer support services, allowing for the creation of new tickets directly.

Moreover, tickets can be created and managed directly via email, providing a straightforward overview of all project statuses and updates through feeds.

With features like setting milestones for planning and scheduling releases, and the ability to attach documents or images to tickets, Lighthouse ensures that relevant information is easily accessible to the entire team.

The post Bugs and User Tracking Tools for Developers appeared first on Hongkiat.

In this post, I’ve pulled together 15 Chrome tab extensions that can help you be more organized, be more relaxed, learn more things, and even a few that will give you a laugh or two. Say goodbye to empty newly opened tabs and say hello to better days with more useful and effective replacements.

1. Taco – Task Manager

Get access to all your tasks from multiple task management tools, all in one spot using Taco. It will bring your tasks from Zendesk, Asana, Basecamp, GitHub, Gmail, OmniFocus, Trello and 40+ others, all on the new tab you open.

Download Taco for Chrome

2. Momentum – Personal Dashboard

Get greeted with a cool personal dashboard and a stunning background that brightens your day. You can add your main focus for the day, a regular to-do list, a weather widget, quick links, also great quotes.

Download Momentum for Chrome

3. Figure it Out – Manage Multiple Time Zones

FIO lets you see the current time of locations around the world based on your choices. It works best for teams that work remotely and across continents, and who may need help figuring out the time zones of their colleagues.

Download Figure it Out for Chrome

4. ProductivityTab – Personal Dashboard

iChrome allows you to customize a new tab with stunning themes and dozens of useful widgets. There are available widgets for weather, stock, news, to-do list, quotes, and many others. It’s easy to install and customize, and you need only drag-and-drop to reorder them.

Download ProductivityTab for Chrome

5. Prioritab – Tasks and Priorities Reminder

For the disorganized soul or for those who really love organizing things, Prioritab is for you guys. Every new tab page is a reminder of your priorities. You can add things you need to finish today, this week, or this month.

Download Prioritab for Chrome

6. Speed Dial 2 – Organize Visited Websites

With Speed Dial 2 you easily access your most visited pages, bookmarks, and browsing history. The design is clean, intuitive, and customizable, it’s easy to change the column, size, and others, as well as to customize the themes. You even can browse all the bookmarks via mobile by going to this link.

Download Speed Dial 2 for Chrome

7. Panda – News Reader and Content Curator

Panda lets you stay up to date with the latest or most popular content from top sites for designers, developers, and entrepreneurs e.g. the best shots from Dribbble or Awwwards. You can change the layouts to match your style. Browsing everything worth reading in one place.

Download Panda for Chrome

8. Muzli – Fresh Design Inspiration

Muzli gives you all the design inspiration that you need. It gives you the freshest and the best shots in design from around the Web. You can easily filter from the source site, found on the left sidebar, or just browse Muzli picks.

Download Muzli for Chrome

9. Exposure New Tab – New Photo on Every Tab

Exposure is a site that allows its users to create or upload beautiful photos with narratives. This cool extension will show you a beautiful photo from Exposure every time you open a new Chrome tab. If you want more stories about the photo shown just click the link to the rest of the photo narrative.

Download YYYY for Chrome

10. Ritual – New Photo on Every Tab

If you want to make your new tab more beautiful but don’t want it cluttered by widgets, text, or another, then you can try Ritual. It will display fresh and beautiful photos from Unsplash.

Download Ritual for Chrome

11. Behance New Tab – Displays Behance Projects

This extension displays the inspiration you need from Behance. You can sort based on the featured image, most featured, most appreciated, most viewed, most discussed, or newest image.

Download Behance New Tab for Chrome

12. Random Wikipedia Tab – Shows a Random Wiki Page

Increase your knowledge with a random Wikipedia page every time you open a new tab. You learn something new every day, right? You can change the language to your own; otherwise, it defaults to English.

Download Random Wikipedia Tab for Chrome

13. FlashTabs – Digital Flashcard

Make learning an everyday part of your life with FlashTabs. Each new tab will flash you a question with the answer hidden. If you give up, just show the answer and basically, you learn something new each and every day. You can add your own questions too.

Download FlashTabs for Chrome

14. AnimatedTabs – Discover New Animated GIF

Lets turn your boring new tab screen into something fun. With animatedTabs, a new awesome GIF will show on every new tab. You can customize the image caption, and even share this find with your friends via social media.

Download AnimatedTabs for Chrome

15. Tab cola – Play Sound Effect on New Tab

Don’t like to read or look at pictures? Try this extension instead. It plays a cool sound effect whenever a new tab is opened, for instance, Cola cans are being opened.

Download Tab cola for Chrome

The post 15 Chrome Extensions to Spice Up Blank New Tabs appeared first on Hongkiat.

If you’re bored with the regular services, know that the Internet is home to plenty of other options. Some of them offer more than just shorten-url-to-go services. We’ve updated this post; here are some of the best ones. And yes, most –if not all– of them are free to use.

Related posts:

• How to Create URL Shortener With Your Domain
• Building a URL Shortener with PHP
• How to See Shortened URLs Without Opening Them

1. is.gd

Is.gd is an online URL shortener service with many interesting features. Without having to sign up or login, you can shorten any URL with just one click. You can either automatically generate an alias for your shortened URL or specify your own (between 5 to 30 characters) through the ‘further options’ button.

What’s interesting about is.gd is that it allows you to view some basic statistics on who has visited your shortened URL. Plus, it gives you a preview page so you can look at the destination of the shortened URL. Furthermore, there are many plugins, workflows, and browser extensions that support is.gd.

Summary:

• URL domain: https://is.gd/
• Short URL example: https://is.gd/rXv0Kh
• Sign-up / login required? – No
• Alternative domain? – Yes, v.gd
• Keyword customization? – No
• Analytics and tracking? – Yes
• API provided? – No
• Bookmarklet? – No

Other features:

• Plenty of support from developers

Shorten URL with is.gd

2. ouo.io

ouo.io is a URL shortening service that just works. You can simply enter a URL of any length and get its shortened version in one click and without any sign up required.

A cool feature of ouo.io is that you can earn every time a user clicks on the URL shortened through this service. Just sign up for an account and check out the payout rate that’s different for each country. There is, however, no API or any option to add custom keywords to your shortened URLs.

Summary:

• URL domain: https://ouo.io/
• Short URL example: https://ouo.io/jl6WXZm
• Sign-up / login required? – No
• Alternative domain? – No
• Keyword customization? – No
• Analytics and tracking? – No
• API provided? – No
• Bookmarklet? – No

Other features:

• Get paid when links is clicked, read more about it here.

Shorten URL with ouo.io

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a popular social media management platform that offers a URL shortening feature on its dashboard called Ow.ly. You need to have a Hootsuite account in order to user it, but the good thing is that it comes with the free version of Hootsuite, so that’s a relief.

Like all other URL shortness, it offers a one-click functioning. Plus, you can add tracking on your shortened URL and customize the keywords in your URL.

Summary:

• URL domain: http://ow.ly/
• Short URL example: http://ow.ly/uvc750KlPzj
• Sign-up / login required? – Yes
• Alternative domain? – No
• Keyword customization? – No
• Analytics and tracking? – Yes
• API provided? – No
• Bookmarklet? – no

Shorten URL with Hootsuite

4. Bitly

Bitly already has a god name among URL shortening services. Through a cleaner interface and no login required, you can shorten your URLs in a jiffy. Some of the best features of Bitly include flexibility of customizing the shortened URL and an overview of the URL statistics and analytics.

Moreover, the site provides API to integrate Bitly in your workflow and project management tools. Though the service is free, but you can get many advanced features like custom link redirects, custom domain, and data export through paid subscriptions.

Summary:

• URL domain: https://bit.ly/
• Short URL example: https://bit.ly/3AtI6yj
• Sign-up / login required? – No
• Alternative domain? – Yes
• Keyword customization? – Yes
• Analytics and tracking? – Yes
• API provided? – Yes
• Bookmarklet? – no

Other features:

• Branded links.
• More features here.

Shorten URL with Bitly

5. zzb.bz

zzb.bz lets you shorten your URLs in a fast and efficient way. Though there is no sign-up required for shortening URLs, however in order to manage all shortened URLs, you need to register for an account.

Unlike many other URL shortness in the list, you can password-protect the shortened links and add descriptions to your record of URLs. Also, there’s an option to specify the URL you want but remember to check its availability to make it yours.

Summary:

• URL domain: https://zzb.bz/
• Short URL example: https://zzb.bz/5PDq1
• Sign-up / login required? – No
• Alternative domain? – Yes, gcc.gl
• Keyword customization? – Yes
• Analytics and tracking? – no
• API provided? – Yes
• Bookmarklet? – Yes

Shorten URL with zzb.bz

6. YouTube shorten URL

y2u.be is a URL shortener that works only for shortening URLs for YouTube videos. Though there is no option for customization, however, you can choose between a short or a very short URL. Plus, you get a QR code for the shortened URL which is a great feature.

What’s more is that y2u.be offers an API that allows you to incorporate it in your apps and web services. Though there is no analytics feature, some of the other tools in the list.

Summary:

• URL domain: https://youtu.be/
• Short URL example: https://youtu.be/PkwvvO9icm0
• Sign-up / login required? – No
• Alternative domain? – No
• Keyword customization? – No
• Analytics and tracking? – No
• API provided? – No
• Bookmarklet? – No

Shorten URL with y2u.be

7. tny.im

A unique in the list, tny.im is a URL shortener as well as a shortener for images, email addresses, source code, and link list, etc. Even though you don’t need to register for using the service, but to avail all other features you need to sign up for an account.

Talking about the features, these include statistics for short URL, link editing even after it is created, public API, sharing toolbar, and a bookmarklet. There’s also a Firefox OS app so you can work on it on the go.

Summary:

• URL domain: http://tny.im/
• Short URL example: http://tny.im/t5X
• Sign-up / login required? – No
• Alternative domain? – No
• Keyword customization? – Yes
• Analytics and tracking? – Yes
• API provided? – Yes
• Bookmarklet? – Yes

Other features:

• Able to edit URL after it is created.
• Link preview

Shorten URL with tny.im

8. TinyURL

TinyURL gives you an easy Lin shortening service. You can customize your shortened URL by entering your own alias or keywords. It does provide analytics for your shortened URLs as well as a bookmarklet to add it to your browser. There are also alternative domains, however available for paid subscription.

Summary:

• URL domain: https://tinyurl.com/
• Short URL example: https://tinyurl.com/mu4ut2f7
• Sign-up / login required? – No
• Alternative domain? – Yes, tiny.one, and rotf.lol
• Keyword customization? – Yes
• Analytics and tracking? – Yes
• API provided? – Yes
• Bookmarklet? – No

Other features:

• Branded links for free.
• Links management, including monitoring and analytics. (Sign-up required)

Shorten URL with TinyURL

9. TinyCC

As the name says, you can use tiny.cc to convert your log URLs into shorter ones. There’s no login required to shorten URLs, but the links you create without registration get expire after some time.

You can get click statistics and other analytics for your links as well as the option to manage URLs through editing or deleting. You can also get a bookmarklet tool for one-click link shortening anywhere on the web.

Summary:

• URL domain: http://tiny.cc/
• Short URL example: http://tiny.cc/4c7wuz
• Sign-up / login required? – No
• Alternative domain? – No
• Keyword customization? – Yes
• Analytics and tracking? – Yes
• API provided? – Yes
• Bookmarklet? – Yes (Sign-in required)

Other features:

• Branded links. (Paid plan required)

Shorten URL with TinyCC

10. Rebrandly

Rebrandly offers you to shorten your URLs using custom domain names so you can create a greater brand recall for the shared links. It lets you track click rates of the URLs created through the service and you can post them to blogs, social media sites, ads, or emails.

Rebrandly also offers API so you can use it in your apps and services. However, there is no bookmarklet option available.

Summary:

• URL domain: https://rb.gy/
• Short URL example: https://rb.gy/xarrsw
• Sign-up / login required? – No
• Alternative domain? – Yes
• Keyword customization? – Yes
• Analytics and tracking? – Yes
• API provided? – Yes
• Bookmarklet? – No

Other features:

• Able to generate QR code for link.
• More features with paid plans.

Shorten URL with Rebrandly

11. Cuttly

Cuttly is basically a link management platform with URL shortener being one of its features. You can shorten any link without any sign-up required but for greater link management, you need to sign up for registration.

Cuttly’s other features include advanced link analytics, URL customisation, UTM code generator, password protection, mobile link redirection, and editable link destination among many others.

Summary:

• URL domain: https://cutt.ly/
• Short URL example: https://cutt.ly/kXl7fa4
• Sign-up / login required? – No
• Alternative domain? – Yes
• Keyword customization? – No
• Analytics and tracking? – Yes
• API provided? – Yes (Sign up required)
• Bookmarklet? – No

Other features:

• More features with paid plans.

Shorten URL with Cuttly

12. Short.io

Short.io can help you transform long URLs to short branded links. For simple link shortening, you don’t need to register, but to access advanced features, you need to create an account.

Some of it most interesting features include password-protecting your links, generating QR code, link cloaking, redirection for mobile users, and geo-targeting to deliver appropriate content.

Summary:

• URL domain: https://4udl.short.gy/
• Short URL example: https://4udl.short.gy/9ixhKZ
• Sign-up / login required? – No
• Alternative domain? – Yes
• Keyword customization? – Yes
• Analytics and tracking? – Yes
• API provided? – Yes
• Bookmarklet? – No

Other features:

• Link cloaking.
• Integration with other tools and services.
• Password protection.
• More features with paid plans.

Shorten URL with Short.io

13. T.ly

T.ly is link shortener for creating tiny URLs for any type of link. It allows you to track your clicks and offers an API that lets you integrate the tool in any app and service. There’s also a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera.

Summary:

• URL domain: https://t.ly/
• Short URL example: https://t.ly/KF_s
• Sign-up / login required? – No
• Alternative domain? – Yes (Sign up required)
• Keyword customization? – Yes (Sign up required)
• Analytics and tracking? – Yes
• API provided? – Yes
• Bookmarklet? – No

Other features:

• Chrome browser extension.
• Customizable QR Codes

Shorten URL with T.ly

The post 10+ Best Free URL Shortening Services appeared first on Hongkiat.

The apps shown here are available for mobile, which we’re guessing is the most popular way we take photos now. Some of them have great ways to better sort and organize your photos for you; others have handy sharing capabilities and album-making "powers".

Crunch Gallery

Always struggling to keep all your photos and videos but lacking the space to do so? Crunch is an app that can help reduce the size of your favorite photos and videos so you can store more and delete fewer of your precious memories. This also makes it less taxing on your data plan.

Crunch makes your photos smaller by up to 6 times without compromising on the quality of said photos. Videos can also be reduced to about 50% of their original size. Crunch reduces file sizes with the use of proprietary photos and video technologies.

The app offers up to 1 GB of free space, which is extensible by sharing about the app.

• iOS

Google Photos

A smarter home for your photos and videos, Google Photos offers automatic backup, an organization system, and a powerful search engine to better sort and find your photos.

It gives users free unlimited storage for backing up unlimited high-quality photos and videos. You can access your photos from any device you have or via the website.

With this app, you can instantly create movies, collages, animation, and panoramas from your photos. On top of that, your photos can be edited simply and powerful by photo and video editing tools that apply filters, adjust lighting, and many more.

• Android
• iOS

QuickPic

This is one of the alternative album applications which can replace the stock gallery application. QuickPic supports online cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Flickr, One Drive, Box, Xandex, 500x, and many more. You can find new pictures instantly via the filters: time and location.

Quickpic will make a slideshow view of your photos for you to scan or edit with their internal photo editor. Using its powerful management features, you can sort, rename, create new folders, and move and copy pictures easily.

Photos and videos you want to keep for your eyes only can be protected by a password. Once you are done, you can transfer your media files between multiple devices via WiFi.

• Android

Slidebox

After attending an event such as a party, you’d probably have to clear up the photos you’ve taken. You will find duplicates, blurry photos, or photos that didn’t turn out the way you want (and are beyond saving). You can clear all these things up quickly and easily with Slidebox.

Slidebox lets you organize photos and albums directly in your photo gallery. Swipe away photos you want to delete and sort the best ones into a separate album. Compare photos side-by-side to find duplicates and decide which version stays and which ones go.

• Android
• iOS

Moments

Moments is a great app that helps you sync photos with friends, making it the app to have if you have a lot of gatherings, parties, and group activities. Moments recognizes your face from your profile picture and the pictures you are tagged in on Facebook. You can then swap your photos with your friends’ photos via Moments.

This app will help you to sort the photos based on who you took the photo with and when it was taken. No more email attachments or manually picking photos to send to multiple friends.

• Android

Picjoy

Picjoy makes it fun and easy to create and share stories of your pictures while keeping everything private and personal. Simply install the Picjoy application and let the organization begin quickly.

It is an intelligent photo library that automatically organizes all photos while still allowing you to create beautiful photo albums and tell the story behind your photo experience. You can also search your photos by location, weather, season, event, time, and many more categories.

• iOS

1Gallery

1Gallery gives you a great source to manage your photos on your Android device. You can protect your photos by hiding them in the app and hiding your image files through encryption.

This simple app allows you to create folders and organize your photos into categories. You can also search your photos within the gallery and add a widget to your Android home screen. Plus, there’s an option to edit the photos in the gallery.

• Android

A+ Gallery

A+ Gallery helps you manage and save your photos in a reliable app. Through different themes, you can customize the app’s appearance and create different photo albums.

The app has a clean and minimal interface and can organize your photos concerning size, the date is taken, and the place where you took them. You can also password-protect your albums and easily back up your photos to any cloud storage.

• Android

Simple Gallery

Simple Gallery offers to view and edit your photos on your Android phone. It helps you browse, manage, and edit your photos and supports a number of formats including .jpg, .png, .raw, .mkw, and .mp4.

There’s an option to limit who can view or edit your photos using a password. Plus, the app is ad-free!

• Android

Gallery

To get your photos and videos automatically organized in your Android device, Gallery is the best app. It arranges your photos every night by people, selfies, animals, documents, and videos and fetches any image real fast from your gallery.

You can easily transfer your photos to and from your SD card. There’s also a feature for editing your photos right in the app. And the best part, it works equally well offline.

• Android

Memoria Photo Gallery

Created with gorgeous Material Design, Memoria Photo Gallery gives you so many ways to manage your photos in your phone’s gallery. It offers you to seamlessly navigate among your pictures, zoom in and out, and control through different swipe gestures.

With Memoria, you can choose which album you want to add to the app and which to leave out. Also, you can assign a cover photo to your albums, customize the app’s appearance, view photos in a slideshow, and search through the photos with a quick search.

• Android

PhotoSync

PhotoSync lets you to back up and transfer your photos and videos in real quick and easy way. Being available on different platforms, you can access it anywhere and transfer it to and from any platform.

It lets you transfer photos and media to a NAS device, portable hard drive, personal cloud, or over FTP, SMB, WebDAV, and SFTP.

What’s more is that you can sync your phone’s camera with the app for instant transfer of photos to your desired storage. You can also download photos from WiFi SD cards as soon as you finish your shooting.

• Android
• iOS

Piktures

A one-of-a-kind app, Piktures lets you connect your Android device with your personal cloud and computer. With a powerful rendering engine, you can preview your photos really fast, and with a privacy-first approach, it does not collect the user’s personal information.

With access to all the popular cloud services and personal cloud support, it makes backing up your pictures a breeze. There’s also a powerful video player right in the app.

• Android

F Stop Gallery

A lightweight and fast photo management app, F Stop Gallery offers some really cool features. Optimized for Material Design, it allows you to search through your photos through file names and metadata.

You can set folder structure, theme, and other app settings and password-protect your images or albums. Moreover, you can share your images on social media platforms or edit them in photo editing apps.

• Android

Gemini Photos

Take control of your photos in your iOS app through Gemini. It allows you to clear duplicates and similar photos from your Camera Roll and even helps you pick the best one from similar shots.

Additionally, it helps declutter by deleting unwanted screenshots, blurred images, charts, notes, etc.

• iOS

The post 15 Mobile Apps to Manage Photos appeared first on Hongkiat.

This post lists some of the most creative CSS animations you’ll find on the web. From transition effects to character animations, you’ll find some really cool examples here that you can either directly use in your project or take inspiration from. So, take a look and pick your favorite.

CSS Loading Animation

Creator: patrikhjelm

Seven animated dots shift left and right to signify a loading action.

Animated Shopping Cart Icon

Creator: jonitrythall

Cute animated effects for when groceries are added to the shopping cart. Scroll down for more.

Hamburger CSS3 only animation

Creator: Dawid Krajewski

Built with pure CSS, no JS or anything else.

404 animated Character

Creator: With An Es

At least with this error page, a developer is working on it. Even if it is a 404.

CSS Mars Landing

Creator: mgitch

We have landed on Mars! Made with CSS.

The Avenger

Creator: mariosmaselli

Can you hear hulk’s anger shake through the screen? Cool, right?

Day / Night toggle

Creator: jsndks

Now, you can toggle day and night with CSS. Genius idea!

Google Now 3rd party app

Creator: codecalm

Google Now third party apps, animated.

Clo clo

Creator: judag

Does a rooster move like that? You bet it does, complete with the jiggy neck. Great CSS3 practice.

Another CSS Preloader

Creator: Maseone

An awesome CSS rhythmic loading animation. Hypnotic, isn’t it?

Submit button

Creator: auginator

Click to submit, and the button animates the loading process until submission is complete!

Elastic SVG Sidebar Material Design

Creator: suez

Drag the white bar to the right to see an elastic sidebar effect.

Particle button

Creator: igcorreia

Do what the button says: hover for awesomeness.

Gooey button

Creator: Lucas Bebber

Click for the Gooey effect. You’ll get it once you see it, and you will click on it a few times more. Amirite?

Flipside button

Creator: hakimel

Click on any side of the Delete button and the button will flip according to where you click.

True hamburger menu!

Creator: CharlesSmart

A truly delicious hamburger menu. Click the hamburger for effects

Cruisin’

Creator: yy

See motorbike go.

3D cube wave

Creator: waddington

Holy 3D Cube-sicles!

Signature animation

Creator: drygiel

Here’s a signature that is not actually a GIF animation, but instead a PNG sequence animated with CSS3.

Background gradient animation

Creator: quasimondo

This trick changes the background gradient from one color to the other in a smooth, continuous form.

Star wars toggle icon

Creator: rss

A hamburger menu gets transformed into lightsabers in battle (a cross).

GIF Style animation

Creator: jascha

Watch as a photo materializes from the midst of pixel art.

Focus in/out input animation

Creator: fluxus

A little animated pen animated writes atop the forom you are filling in.

Chromatic triangle

Creator: felipedefarias

An awesome optical illusion, yes, done with CSS3.

Coffee maker

Creator: thisisroger

Here’s a reminder to take your daily dose of coffee. Like you need one.

Chrome Dinosaur

Creator: nickspiel

Can’t reach the page you want beacuse of a dropped connection? Here’s the dinosaur you always see when that happens, only this time it is running from a meteorite!

CSS shake

Creator: elrumordelaluz

Hover over each effect to watch the little guy shake.

Newton’s Cradle Loader

Creator: All Things Smitty

If you know physics, you certainly know Newton’s cradle, but probably not like this.

Launch the Modal

Creator: koolhaus

Click to see the nice and smooth modal window animation.

Walking Robot

Creator: P233

This robot just keeps walking, and walking, and walking, around the Y axis.

Flexing Pagination Arrows

Creator: Hakim

From the first page to the last, this pagination animation shows clearly how if you are faring, pagewise.

Here’s more:

Animated 3D Helix

First one in the list is an incredible animation made by Marcofolio.net, using CSS3 3D transforms. The animation looks like magic itself, but you can actually learn to create a similar effect with the tutorial in the article!

Animated Buttons

A must-see for web designers, as the demo not only shows the possibilities of CSS3 animation but also provides very cool and practical button effects for inspiration!

Animation Menus

Trying to spice up your animation menus to make them look really cool and creative? This demo is for you.

Big Deal

It’s the smooth and nice animation that made this demo a big deal.

CSS3 Man

Look out, here comes the CSS3 man! A perfect example to showcase the true potential of CSS3 animation.

Dribbble Ball Bouncing

With the little use of graphic tricks comes to a nice and amusing CSS3 animation.

Frame by Frame Animation

Frame by frame animation with CSS3? No problem!

Graph Animation

A simple but powerful animation for you to show/explain the graph in your site, learn to make it!

Hover Effects

The future of the hover effect comes with CSS3. Sleek and promising.

Infinite Zoom

Smooth animation; it’s also a nice way to show off your portfolio. The total zoom for the 26 images is 67108864:1.

Kinect and CSS3

“14 body joints are tracked and converted into a short CSS animation using Xbox Kinect. The body data is brought into the browser where it is parsed and converted into CSS animations with animatable.com.”

Matrix

Want to be as cool as Matrix? With the CSS3, you’re able to make it.

Morphing Cubes

Experimental demo exploring the CSS3 using 3D transforms, animations and transitions. The interesting part here is you can still select the text on the elements, even when they are still rotating.

Our Solar System

You don’t need expensive standalone software to help students explore solar systems anymore.

Duff Roll

“Mmmmmm….Homer would love the never-ending supply of beer.”

Poster Circle

A simple yet interesting example showing you how to use CSS transformation and animation to achieve an interesting effect.

Star Wars Crawl

Star Wars opening’s crawl effect! Just as epic as CSS3.

Typography Effects

Besides button, menu, and hover effects, you can also achieve creative typography effects with CSS3. jQuery is also involved in this demo to style the letters of the words.

Walking With Andrew Hoyer

Best of all, you can also learn to walk with Andrew Hoyer in the article!

Wonder Webkit

A wonderful use of CSS3 3D transformations with JavaScript Matrix library. Sounds technical, but the outcome is rockingly cool.

Zoetrope

What else you can’t do with CSS3 when Zoetrope is possible with it?

More:

Here are more related articles you might be interested in:

• Beginner’s Guide to CSS3
• Creating A Rocking CSS3 Search Box
• Building HTML5/CSS3 Webpages
• Graceful Breadcrumb Navigation Menu in CSS3
• Create An Ajax-based HTML5/CSS3 Contact Form
• 35 Graphics Built Purely With CSS3
• more..

The post 30 Cool CSS Animations For Your Inspiration appeared first on Hongkiat.

As different types of blocks require different types of techniques to bypass, therefore in this post, we have listed several methods that you can try to access blocked websites.

You can try each of them to you find the one that works for your situation. And if you have any other methods you would like to share with fellow readers, do mention it in the comment section.

1. Accessing via IP Instead of URL

Some software block website pages by its name or URL only. For example: a block may be applied on www.facebook.com but not on the IP of the website.

You can get the IP from Terminal on macOS or Command Prompt if you using Windows. Insert this and press Enter.

ping yourdomain.com

Copy the IP that is shown in the results onto your browser’s address bar and open the site as usual.

Please keep in mind that while this might not work only when the site is able and to handle request from the IP directly. Some websites might redirect you to the website or will give you error as the certificate is only registered for the domain name.

2. Use A Proxy Site

There are many free web proxies that provide services to browse the web anonymously. To find out sites that offers this service, simply seach for "proxy sites" in Google and you will find abundance of them.

You can use them to access any blocked site easily. Just go the website and enter the URL you want to browse.

How does this work? When you browse a website using a proxy site, you are not actually connected to that website. You are connected to the proxy server, while the proxy server is the one that is connected to the true website destination. What you see is cached version of the site that the proxy server gives to you.

3. Use a VPN Service

Another way to get around a blocked sites is by using a Virtual Service Network (VPN) service. A VPN service provides an encrypted connection or tunnel between your computer and the internet through their network.

Typically they provide a number of network in various location around the globe, so you can act as if you’re browsing, say from Germany even if you’re actually in other country, essentially it secure and hides your real identity when browsing online.

There are many VPN service providers you can use, some offer services for free, others require a subscription.

4. Use TOR Browser

Tor is a browser that allows you to browse anonymously, prevent your browsing habits or your location from being tracked, ensuring privacy. Thanks to volunteers from around the world that create this distributed network of relays, you can browse under the protection of Tor.

To use, first you need to download the Tor Browser; install it like a usual application. Open the application, then click Connect to start your connection with the Tor network.

5. Using Public DNS of ISPs

Some Internet Service Providers (ISP) use their own DNS to block access to some websites. To open the block you can bypass the restriction from ISP using Google Public DNS.

Under the DNS configuration of yoru network, change your DNS to the following Google Public DNS IP addresses as your primary or secondary DNS server.

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

IPv6

2001:4860:4860::8888
2001:4860:4860::8844

6. Setting Your Browser’s Proxy Manually

To manually set your browser’s proxy, you need to first get working public proxies. Find one in Hidemyass. There are many listed there, from countries around the world, along with the speed, type and anonymity level. Grab one IP address and the port, then:

Firefox Users:

Go to Preference > Advanced and choose tab Network. Under Connection click Settings, then choose Manual Proxy Configurations.

Here, you enter the HTTP Proxy obtained from Hidemyass, followed by the port number, and click OK.

Chrome Users:

Chrome does not natively support setting up proxy within the browser itself. You will need to set it OS setting level which might not be favorable to some of you as the setting will affect all your internet activity regardless of the browser use. Alternately, you can use Proxy Helper.

7. Edit Hosts Files to Bypass Website’s IP Address

You can use this service from Pentest Tools to get the IP address for a blocked website’s domain and subdomain. Just insert the domain name and check ‘Include subdomain details’ and click START, then wait while the tool does the job for you.

When it is done, copy the IP address and domain/subdomain.

If you are using macOS, open Terminal, type the following to open the hosts file:

sudo nano ~/etc/hosts

Scroll down to the opened hosts file and paste the IP address right there. Press Control + X then Y to save the file.

8. Use SSH Tunnels

SSH tunnel allows you to forward request to the internet through a remote server via SSH (Secure Shell). So for this to work, you’ll need to have an account to get you the IP and the proctol to connect to SSH, which you can typically obtain by spining0-up a VPS or a dedicated server.

Then open Terminal on your macOS (if you are using Windows you can use Putty instead) and run following command to login:

ssh -D 12345 user@host.domain

The command will run the SOCKS server on port 12345. You will be asked for a username and password. After a successful login, just minimize the terminal, don’t close it.

Next, open your Firefox browser and go to Preferences > Advanced > Network > Settings. Check on Manual Proxy Configurations, enter 127.0.0.1 on SOCKS Hosts and insert the Port number you picked when you created the SSH tunnel. Click OK to save your new settings.

Afterwards, open a blank tab and type ‘about:config’, then set true for the following statement:

network.proxy.socks_remote_dns

Now you can browse with Firefox using your tunnel. For a more detailed tutorial, check out the complete tutorial here.

9. Cloudflare WARP

Cloudflare provides is one services with one of the most widespread network across the globe. On top various services such as DNS, security, and the performance boost for website, we can also use it to pass through the geo block when accessing website with the app called Cloudflare WARP.

It’s a free app available in many platform include mobile (iOS and Android) and desktop (macOS, Windows, and Linux).

The app works similar to a VPN service except, instead of choosing the server yourself, Cloudflare will enroute your request automatically through the fastest node on their network. It’s simple to use and free.

The post How to Access Blocked Websites (9 Ways) appeared first on Hongkiat.

So this post features some of the best sites to get email templates all for free. Some can be built on top of a provided basic template while others have ready-made frameworks and components which you can piece together. So withou any further ado, let’s jump onto the list.

Salted

Salted is a responsive HTML email template which can be used as a base for an email template. This clean template is used on Litmus email newsletters. The styling for displaying open-source-email-templates/ is already optimized and you can use the percentage tables, or the media queries to keep everything fluid.

Cerberus

Cerberus are responsive email patterns that you can use to adapt a regular email design into a responsive one, fairly easily. There are two kinds of templates, one with media queries, and one without, for fluid layouts (sizes itself regardless of media query support).

Responsive HTML Email Template

There are two kinds of HTML email templates here, an inlined version and a non-inlined version that can be used on a marketing service like Mailchimp, as is. This email template is tested on major email clients, both mobile and desktop.

Email Blueprints

You can find about 25 general templates and 6 responsive templates here, which are built especially for MailChimp users.

Respmail

An email template designed to work on major devices and email platforms, this template uses MailChimp blueprints as a base, and is tested and reviewed for compatibility and re-structured for Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and other services.

Ink

Ink is a framework you can use to quickly build responsive HTML emails that will work on any device or for any email client. Ink includes a 12-column grid with some UI elements for quick prototyping.

Transactional Email Templates

A responsive template for transactional emails, you can find 3 templates here: for action email, email alerts and for billing. All templates have been tested on popular email clients.

Antwort

Antwort offers a responsive email template that lets you use columsn on desktop then adapt to rows when you are on smaller mobile screens. There are also templates included for single-column, double-column or three-column (with open-source-email-templates/) use.

Responsive Email

A table based yet responsive email template, with Mailchimp merge tags in place. Although it has only one template, you can spice things up with the many layout options available.

Email Framework

Email Framework offers pre-build components you can use to build a responsive HTML email template. It also includes boilerplate.html, a base HTML file that can be edited.

Zenith

Zenith is an email framework made using SASS. It features a responsive grid, easy to control layout, typography, colour schemes and others using SASS variables.

Shopify HTML Email Templates

You will find 10 templates here that deals with things like welcoming new users, activation of accounts, refund notifications, shipping updates, password reset and more.

Passion

Passion is pre-designed email template with responsive support. It gives off a minimalistic, cleancut and simple vibe.

Responsive HTML email templates

Here’s a responsive email template with compatibility with all major email clients, made with well commented and readable code. There are three templates (general, promotional and explorational) with different color schemes.

Penrose

Here’s a flat responsive newsletter template that is compatible with almost all email clients.

Responsive Email

Want something super simple, just the basics? You got it. Follow the three steps you need to set this email template for your own use.

WDW

Get two templates, one for a weekly update template and another as a signup template provided by Web Design Weekly.

Gleemail

On top of templates, Gleemail lets you build HTML email templates with Mustache and style them with Stylus.

Mosaico

Mosaico is an open source email tempalte editor and you can find two templates provided for free, which you can play with. Edit, drag and drop and fiddle with the components inside.

Postmark Templates

There are 3 templates available here, a welcome email, a reset password email and a receipt email, all provided by Postmark templates. If you want to take a look at their appearance, follow their blog post about it.

EightMedia boilerplate

Find a boilerplate to build your email template on. A basic template has been provided. You can write code on Jade. SASS and automatic CSS inlining have been included to make your work easier.

Bella/h4>

Bella is a clean, bright and modern free multi-purpose email template. It is available in HTML and PSD format.

Rafeca

Find responsive email templates that were used for giffgaff marketing emails here. Download the templates from GitHub here.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor has released more than 100 free email templates for download. There are 36 templates that can be previewed on the page, while the rest of them can be downloaded with the “Download All” link at the bottom.

Responsive Email Template

A responsive email template, adapted for mobile use made by Rachel Beser.

The post 25 Sites For Open-source Email Templates appeared first on Hongkiat.

In this list, we have smart locks that can be unlocked with a smartphone app for easy access while assigning time-specific keys to guests, friends, tenants etc; smart devices with multiple sensors, high-resolution cameras; even devices that learn your daily routine so they can figure out what isn’t routine. Most of these devices will alert you of any intrusion and allow you in turn to alert authorities right from their app.

It’s a new age, and you need protection that can help safeguard your home and its residence no matter where you are.

ecobee SmartCamera

Ecobee offers a smart indoor camera that helps you keep an eye on your family or pets while you’re away. It features a 180 degree field of view, a built-in smoke alarm, and auto pan and zoom capabilities. You can have access to 30-day video history and produces high definition footage in both light and dark environments.

One of its coolest features is the motion detection. The SmartCamera detects as soon as a person enters the frame and keeps moving along his/her movements. Additionally, it sends you notification on your smartphone in case of smoke detection or when there’s an unwanted movement in the house.

Netatmo Smart Indoor Siren

Netatmo is a smart alarm that notifies you if any unusual activity takes place in your house. It is an intelligent and intuitive alarm system that actives and deactivates itself automatically so you don’t have to worry about arming and disarming the alarm every time you leave the house or return.

It’s really easy to set up the alarm – just install the Netatmo Security app in your phone and place the Smart Siren anywhere in the house and watch it in action. It comes with some pre-recorded noises to make it sound like someone’s home and even alerts you if someone tries to disable it.

Xiaomi Mi 360° Home Security Camera

This Mi 360° indoor security camera offers a full home protection with so many wonderful features. With a dual motor head that rotates 360°, the camera gives you an all-round vision of the room it’s placed in and doesn’t even make any sound while rotating.

Some of its other interesting features include motion detection to alert you about any intruder, infrared night vision to capture footage in dark environments, and you can seamlessly stream the security video in full HD. The camera is supported by Alexa and Google Assistant.

August Smart Lock

With August you can now turn any iOS/Android smartphone or Apple Watch into a virtual key to your home. It auto-locks the door behind you, no more fumbling with your keys.

All usage of assigned virtual keys are logged into the system so you can track who comes and goes, identifiable by their individual keys. August also allows you to grant time-sensitive access to friends or guests.

Novi

Novi may look like a smoke detector (and that’s because it is one) but it has three more features that makes it a solid home security gadget. It has a motion sensor, a 170 degree HD camera recording in real-time and a 90dB siren for when you need to scare away an intruder.

The Novi app informs you via your smartphone if something is wrong.

Wireless Hidden Camera

It is a motion activated camera that sends push alerts to your phone. It featrures No-Glow IR Night Vision, 150° wide angle vision, SD Card recording that keeps recording while charging, and is iOS and Android compatible.

With Wifi connectivity to room’s 2.4GHz router, you can watch live video feed or playbacks no matter where you are by accessing its mobile app.

Haven

Unlike other keylock mechanisms, Haven is a lock that is placed at the bottom of the door, providing a sturdy obstacle to prevent unwanted entry. Haven is made with steel and glass-reinforced nylon and aluminum.

It comes with a Bluetooth-enabled key fob which you can press to lock or unlock Haven. It can be integrated with your other Smart Home gadgets.

August Smart Lock

Looking for a stylish and less-imposing smart lock? August works on top of your existing lock so you can still use your keys. You can also issue e-keys over WiFi for temporary passage to friends or guests.

Any entry will trigger a notification and you can check the locked status at any time through your phone.

Kevo

Kevo is a Bluetooth-enabled electronic deadbolt that is available in many retail stores and can be bought online as well. A Kevo can be unlocked with a tap with your smartphone (with the Kevo app) or the Kevo Fob.

You can also give temporary access to friends with an eKey. Kevo also works with Nest, allowing you to set your home temperature accordingly.

Canary Pro

Any movement detected in Canary’s night vision mode with infrared LED triggers a notification, and allows you to call authorities easily with the app. Its high-quality recordings (great for securing convictions), can be streamed in real-time and stored up to 30 days in the cloud.

It also comes with a siren you can sound to scare away intruders.

The post 10 Security Gadgets That’ll Make You Feel Safer at Home appeared first on Hongkiat.

It is probably easier to manage a ton of media, such as our photos, videos and music on the desktop. This is where tools like what you see in this post come to play.

Apart from being able to transfer large files from mobile to desktop, it also allows us to better manage the files and materials in our mobile. A few of these apps even gives us access to the phone’s camera, or to take mobile screenshots from the desktop.

Most importantly, we can do all this without being limited by the different desktop OS. Let’s check out the tools you can use to manage your Android from your desktop.

1. Airmore

Airmore is an app that allows you to stream videos, photos, and your music collection on your smartphone. Photos are organized by day or month to make it easy to download or delete. With Airmore, you can also manage contacts, send multiple messages at once to your contacts or even make a call (note that you cannot end the call directly from your desktop).

How to use Airmore

1. Install the app for Android or iOS. Open the app.
2. Open Airmore Web on your PC browser, and scan the QR code displayed. Click "Accept" on your mobile.
3. Alternatively, the connection can be made via IP or code or mobile hotspot connection as well.

With Airmore, you can connect your Android to Mac or iOS to PC as well. For troubleshooting help, check out their help page. Airmore lets you manage all files both on phone memory and SD card, and of course, transferring files between phone and PC is easy.

2. Connect Me

ConnectMe allows you to stream any video or any other media saved on your phone. You can even link to the phone camera and watch the feed from the desktop. On top of that, you can send SMS and make phone calls with ease without touching your phone. It will even notify you when someone calls you or sends you a message.

How to use Connect Me

1. Install the app and open it.
2. Using your home WiFi, visit the web address shown on the app on your PC’s browser. Click ‘OK’ on your phone to connect.
3. Alternatively, you can connect your PC to your phone’s WiFi with a name generated by the app. Open the URL shown on your phone with your PC browser.

Connect Me works with Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS and even Smart TVs. The app also lets you send ringtones, clipboard data, APK files, or push URLs to your phone. With root access, you can even take screenshots of your phone.

3. Airdroid

Airdroid is one of the most popularly known Mobile to PC apps out there and it comes with a plethora of features. These features include being able to show notifications from incoming calls or messages, as well as app notifications from messaging apps like Whatsapp. Getting an Airdroid account allows you to find your phone.

How to use Airdroid

1. Install Airdroid, and open the app.
2. Open Airdroid Web and scan the QR code to connect.
3. Alternatively, you can download the desktop app for Windows or macOS. Starting the app on the desktop will launch the app on your mobile.

Apart from that Airdroid also works well when transferring files between phone and PC and also lets the desktop link to the phone’s camera. A cool feature it has is AirMirror, which allows you to run your Android app right from your PC with the same interface on your smartphone (but this requires root access on your Android).

4. WiFi File Transfer

WiFi File Transfer does what the rest of the apps in this list do, but in a relatively traditional way. With this small app you can browse all of the files and folders on your Android via WiFi by FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

How to use Wifi File Transfer

1. Download the app.
2. Ensure your Android and PC are on the same WiFi network.
3. Open the application and click "Start Service".
4. Copy and paste the URL address displayed in the app into your FTP client application or Windows Explorer (if you are using windows) or simply open the URL in the browser. You will find all the files on your Android.

If you use an FTP client, commands such as copy, delete or download files exist on the default FTP client application. You won’t find these commands on the browser, however. Basically, this app can do fast, secure and efficient transfers but you will have to do it without a user interface.

5. Mighty Text

Mighty Text is created for those who still text via SMS for reasons we will not explore here. But basically, with Mighty Text, you can send or receive SMS or MMS on your PC using your current phone number, or send an SMS from your Gmail account. The app comes with a PowerView, which lets you carry multiple conservations in one go.

How to use Mighty Text

1. On the installation page, insert your Android phone number to get the app sent to your phone.
2. Install the plugin or extension for your favorite browser. To send text from Gmail, get the required extension on the same page.
3. Launch the Web App to start using.

The app also notifies users of incoming app notification to their phone, and allow these notifications to be dismissed on the PC. The app also has syncing abilities for photos and videos, and you can add filters to your photos right on the PC.

There is a Pro version of this app gives you extra features such as to send and reply to text messages via email, changing the themes, block numbers, create templates and signatures as well as schedulling messages.

6. Xender

Xender is great app to transfer everything from files, photos, music, videos to apps between two Android phones or from Android to a PC, Mac or iOS devices. The Connect PC mode allows users to see the all the files found in their phone, from apps, photos, videos, music and even files from your phone storage.

How to use Xender

1. On your PC browser, open web.xender.com.
2. Download and open the app on your mobile.
3. Tap on the Transfer button and choose which device to transfer to.
4. If you choose Mac or PC, you will need to choose to scan QR code on your mobile. Scan the code to connect.

Xender’s phone to phone transfers incur no data usage, and supports file transfers between iOS and Android devices seamlessly. Two cool features Xender has is that you can create a group of up to 4 devices, and regularly share your files to the same group, and it is a great app to replicate your phone: you can transfer everything you need from your old phone to your new phone seamlessly.

7. Mobizen

Mobizen lets you access and transfer files between your Android and your computer, and lets you access all multimedia files on your phone, including contacts and calls. Mobizen also allows you to share music to your speakers and photos and videos to your larger desktop screen, record your Android screen (minus the rooting), and use your Android from your computer screen.

How to use Mobizen

1. Install the application on your Android. There are two options: one for Samsung devices and the other is for non-Samsung devices.
2. Get the browser plug-in.
3. Log in both the Android app and the web app.
4. You will receive a 6 digit pin that you need to input in the Android app to connect.

You can be connected in several ways: WIFI, USB or even 3G / LTE connection. For the fastest connection, USB connection is the best. The app runs very slowly when I connect via WiFi. Mobizen also comes with a "Find my Device" feature to help you locate your phone, which would be helpful if their over the air connection is better.

The post How to Manage Your Android Smartphone From Desktop appeared first on Hongkiat.

Here are 10 plugins that can help you to boost your productivity when working with Sketch. There are diverse, ranging from content generators, color palette selector, and they can help you to display layer measurements or automatically add padding to a layer.

1. CSS Buddy

CSS Buddy allows you to add the CSS to your layer in the Sketch workspace. Basically, you can apply width, height, opacity, box-shadow, border, and background to the layer using CSS.

With this plugin installed, just select a layer then select Apply to Selected from the plugin menu. A dialog will prompt you to enter your stylesheet. Add the CSS content without the CSS class and watch your layer take shape.

2. Material Design Color Palette

If you follow the trend of Material Design, a prominent thing you will notice is the use of distinctive colors. Material Design has an awesome color palette. Now you can bring that to your workspace with Material Design Color Palette Plugin.

This plugin will generate color palettes in seconds without you having to close your workspace. Choose Hue, Value, or Swatch to generate a color palette that is suitable for your project.

3. Sketch Notebook

Sometimes we need to show what we do in a comment or via documentation. If you are working on projects with other designers or a client’s involvement, this is also necessary so you can ensure that the outcome is what the everybody was aiming for.

Sketch Notebook is a plugin for documenting your design in Sketch with ease. It will add an additional sidebar to your workspace, which contains comments you add to any element on your design. You can reorder comment, realign, delete and toggle comment visibility.

4. Day Player

Before using real images in a design, we often use placeholder images to speed up the design process. For Sketch, you can use Day Player to add customized placeholders to any layer on your Sketch workspace from 6 placeholder image services including Placehold.it, LoremPixel and Unsplash. Once activated, you can set the image’s width, height, and other information.

5. Content Generator

We already have a plugin to insert placeholder images, how about one for general content? Content Generator helps you add dummy data such as avatars, names, geolocation data and more. Works great for mockup designs and for reducing headaches from trying to figure out how to generate data on the spot.

To add the dummy data, just select a layer, then select Plugin > Generator, and choose Geo, Persona or Photos.

6. Sketch Measure

Sketch Measure is a measurement tool for Sketch. It measures the length or size of a layer (or layers) in your design. You also get the padding and margin of a layer as well as the distance between two layers. Sketch Measure can also print the layer properties, such as color, border, and opacity. All measurements can be brought up via keyboard shortcuts.

7. Dynamic Button

Dynamic Button helps you create button with fixed paddings easily. It will automatically adjust the padding based on the value you give, no matter the length of your text. With the plugin installed, a text can be converted into a structure with the shortcut Command+J. The amount of padding required can then be punched in to the (0:0:0:0) text layer (under flex button group).

8. Typographic Scale

Typographic Scale is a plugin to turn selected text layer into typographic scale. To use this plugin, just select text layer (single or multiple), or mixed layer that contains at least one text layer, then select Plugin > Typographic Scale and adjust the value on the dialog. The result is a set of scaled text that follows the rules of typographic scale.

9. Modulizer

With Modulizer you can control the paddings for button, module, or areas on your design with the keyboard shortcut Shift + Command + M. You can combine all your layers, group it then use the shortcut to automatically adjust your padding based on the padding value you need. Watch the video demo to see this in action.

10. Blade

Have you ever thought about converting your design from sketch to HTML? If so, you probably should get Blade, a Sketch plugin that automatically generates HTML files from your design. It will convert group into div, text into p and so on.

When using Blade, you can tell the plugin what DOM element to generate by adding a special name to the layer, such as [btn] or input[text] so Blade knows what it should do. Check out this video demo for an inside look.

Now Read: 12 Useful Plugins for WordPress Developers

The post 10 Free Sketch Plugins for Web Developers appeared first on Hongkiat.

Here are the 20 tools that you can use to work with SVG quickly and efficiently. We have mostly online tools, that can help in optimization, conversion, making patterns, and more.

Interactive SVG Coordinate System

When you work with SVG, you can’t leave its coordinate. This is a great interactive tool by Sara Souiden, to help you learn how SVG coordinates work. Using the viewBox and preserveAspectRatio on SVG, guided by orange and purple lines and a handy ruler, you can play while learning how SVG coordinates function.

b64

b64 is a simple tool to optimize images then turn them into the base64 format. You can drop your SVG images (other formats such as JPG and PNG work, too), then grab the CSS with a base64 background-image as a result.

SVGO

SVG that is exported may contain unnecessary information which can be removed without affecting the rendering result. If you want to remove editor metadata, comments or hidden elements, you can use SVGO.

You can install SVGO via npm, $ [sudo] npm install -g svgo or use the GUI version that offers drag and drop to process your SVG optimation.

SVG OMG

SVG OMG turns the command line of SVGO (the previous tool) into a GUI version that more intuitive and easy to use. Just toggle the buttons to activate or deactivate each feature. In the end, you can grab the result as image files and code as well.

Shapecloud word art generator

Shapecloud is an online tool that makes it possible for you to create personalized word art designs by uploading your own shape via an SVG file (you can also choose a standard shape).

To upload an SVG in Shapecloud, click the ‘Upload shape‘. Then click ‘Click to select the file’ and choose the SVG file you want to upload.

When you are done creating, you can instantly download the design to your computer, phone, or tablet. The design can be downloaded as a PNG, SVG, or PDF file.

SVG Now

When you work on Illustrator, the exported SVG contains some information that is not necessary. With this tool, you will get the optimized version of your exported SVG right from your Illustrator workspace. This tool adds a panel with some options to optimize SVG.

SVG to PNG converter

Want to export SVG files to PNG form? Without opening applications like Illustrator to do so? Use this SVG to PNG Converter tool to get image outputs in PNG format and also PNG Base64 data URI if you need it.

SVG Circus

If you think loader animations are cool, now you can create it easily by utilizing SVG with SVG Circus. The tools enable you to make your own loader, spinner, or anything similar using looped animation. Set the ‘Actor’, position, size, color, and others from the panel, then export to get the results.

SVG Sprite

SVG Sprite is an Node.js module, which optimizes a bunch of SVG files, and bakes them into SVG sprite-types including traditional CSS sprites for background and/or foreground images, SVG stacks and more.

Quasi

With quasi you can generate Quasicrystal images like what you see below. This generator is experimental, but the results are definitely cool. You can play around by changing the value of the option, then download the results with the ‘Save SVG’ button.

Plain Pattern

Creating patterns with SVG has never been easier or more fun. Upload your image, scale down or change the spacing, rotate and recolor until you get a beautiful pattern. You can preview the result before downloading it.

Trianglify Generator

Create beautiful SVG geometric patterns with Trianglify Generator. You can set the color randomness/variant, granularity size, and choose a color palette to work with. This tool is a GUI version of Trianglify.

Export PSD to SVG

If you use Photoshop as the image editor for your work, sometimes you might need to convert your design on the Photoshop workspace into SVG, which is an unsupported format in Photoshop. Download the Script to this tool, then copy to the Adobe Photoshop/presets/scripts folder.

Rename a vector layer name with the SVG extension (e.g. layer1 become layer1.svg), and you can now run the script from File > Scripts > PS to SVG.

SVG Filters

Do you know that with SVG, you are able to add effects such as hue, saturation, blur, linear color overlay, and many others to images? Here is a tool that visualizes these effects, then gives you a snippet to make it easy to embed the effect into your project.

SVG Morpheous

SVG Morpheous is a JavaScript library that allows you to morph an SVG icon from one shape to another. You can set the easing effect, duration of transition animations, and also rotation direction.

Clip path generator

SVG allows you to click the image clip with Shape. This is quite easy if the shape is in the form of a square or a circle. But what if the shape is one with a lot of points or is a polygonal shape? That’s where you need this Clip Path Generator tool.

Chartist.js

Chartist.js is a library to create highly customizable responsive charts. It utilizes SVG to display the charts, which also can be animated using SMIL. With this library, you are able to create line chart, pie chart, bar chart and other types of charts, and even add animation to them.

SVG stroke dash generator

This is a simple tool to generate dashed lines utilizing SVG stroke-dasharray. First, choose one dash type from the list, then customize it in terms of width, height, rotation, or color. Afterward, you can grab the HTML code and CSS to apply this dashed line in your project.

Method Draw: A Simple SVG Editor

Method Draw is a web-based SVG editor with an intuitive interface that comes with tools on both sides of the canvas. You can draw lines, and shapes, input text or built-in use shapes, then edit the properties of the drawn objects. Export the image in SVG format (also comes in SVG base64 format) or save it directly in PNG.

The post 20 Free SVG Tools for Better Graphics (Updated) appeared first on Hongkiat.

Best of all, you can use them all for free. You will need to go to each of the different sources to download the icon set files, though. All in all, there are hundreds of icons featured here, and you’ll surely find what you need.

SVG Icons

Here are 10 icons set taken from free Dribbble shots. From e-commerce and social media to weather and tourism-related icons, you’ll find a wide variety. All icons are ready to use, just take the SVG code and embed it in your HTML, then load the basic CSS files, too.

Happycons

40 unique and colorful vector icons, all free for download. This icon set uses the 180px grid, but you can easily edit them on Illustrator or Sketch to suit your needs.

Flaticon

A site that provides you a huge database of free vector icons from around the world. You can search icons and pick the one you like or browse through the icons by category or from icon packs — we’re talking about hundreds of free icon packs.

Futuramo

Another great site that provides hundreds of free icons and dozens more icon sets. You can customize icons on the site before download, such as changing the icon’s outline width and edge style or changing color and size.

Endless Icons

Endless icons is a free icon library that carries hundreds of icon sets. You can browse from computer icons to office icon sets. The tags feature allows you to find icons with ease.

Flat Color Icons

If you are a big fan of flat design then you need to collect this colorful flat icon set. More than 300+ icons in SVG format are ready to be used on your project or application.

Icons from lavaboom

Here are 69 icons in SVG format that Lavaboom has made free for all. These are the icons they use for their secure email web app. The link sends you to their GitHub page, where their icons are located.

Linea

A site that provides big collections of line icon packs, featuring more than 700 icons for free. There are basic iconsets, as well as icon packs for e-Commerce, music, software, and other categories. The icons come in font icon, PNG, and on the editable SVG format as well.

Material Icons

Are you adopting the Google Material design? If you want icons to go with that design, Google has made beautiful and delightful icon sets for your project on a website, for Android or IOS with the typical stylings of Material Design.

Entypo

A collection of 413 beautifully crafted pictogram icons. There are regular icons and bonus social extension icons for use in any project. All iconsn come in SVG format and are free for all.

Evil Icons

Don’t worry about the name, these icons are free and firendly for both designer and developer. You can download the icons in SVG, AI & Sketch format from the site. You can also get the icon through Ruby, a Node.js package or the Grunt/Gulp plugin.

Flag Icon

If your design needs a country symbol especially a flag, maybe you need this iconset. Flag Icon provides polymer web components for icons of flags covering countries, states, provinces and others. To use these icons for your site, just use for instance,<flag-icon key="canada"></flag-icon> for displaying the Canadian flag.

Thin Line UI Icons

Find 170 vector icons in this iconset, all free for both personal and commercial use. Files are available in EPS, PNG and SVG and the download is done via Dropbox download.

The post Free Multi-Purpose Iconsets to Download appeared first on Hongkiat.

You can download them by clicking into the linked source and grabbing the files in the format that you like (we have listed the available formats for each iconset to make this easier for you). If you like what you see, share the love and spread the cheer by sharing this to a fellow designer who might need it.

12 New Year Icons – Colored & Line

Supported format: SVG, PNG

30 Christmas Icons

Supported format: SVG, EPS

12 Christmas Line Icons

Supported format: EPS

9 Christmas Icons – Bold & Colored

Supported format: AI, EPS

30 Christmas Icons

Supported format: PSD

80 Christmas Tree Icons

Supported format: AI

70 Awesome Xmas Icons

Supported format: Photoshop, Illustrator, SVG

Christmas Icons

Supported format: EPS

30 Freebie Icons – 3 sets

Supported format: AI, PNG, SVG, EPS

12 Outdoor Icons

Supported format: AI

12 Santa Icons

Supported format: AI

12 Holiday icons

Supported format: AI

12 Line Vector Icons

Supported format: AI, EPS, PNG, JPG

55 New Years Icons

Supported format: AI, EPS, PDF, SVG, PNG, PSD, CSG

78 Christmas icons

Supported format: AI

6 Holiday Icons

Supported format: EPS

20 Free Christmas Icons

Supported format: PNG, SVG, EPS, AI

25 Christmas Special Icons

Supported format: EPS

50 Christmas Doodled Icons

Supported format: AI

30 line Icons

Supported format: SVG, EPS, PNG, PSD

18 Flat Christmas Icon

Supported format: SVG, PNG, AI

Here’s more..

#1

#2 @ CreAtive Web Themes

#3 @Assaf shalev

#4 @Cat Lo

#5 @Ess Kay

#6 @Psdblast

#7 @Ess Kay

#8 @Jory Raphael

#9 @Emanuel Serbanoiu

#10 @Freepik

#11 @Dmitriy Miroliubov

#12 @Medialoot

#13 @madefordesigners

#14 @Fabio Di Corleto

The post 40+ Free Christmas Icons to Spruce Up Your Design appeared first on Hongkiat.

If building a web application from the ground seems overwhelming to you, not to worry. Some very generous developers have adapted a few frontend frameworks to support Angular. Like a typical framework, they come with pre-built web components. These make using the framework the perfect tool for anyone who needs to get a web application up and running quick.

Here are 5 frameworks you can use to kick-start a web-based application with Angular.

1. Angular Bootstrap

Angular Bootstrap, as the name implies, is built on top one of the most popular front-end frameworks, Bootstrap. This framework contains a set of Bootstrap components such as Carousel, Alert, and Collapse along with some additions, like Rating and TimePicker.

All these components have been ported to use Angular directives and custom HTML elements. For example, rather than using a <div> to wrap the Carousel, you can use a more “meaningful” custom element, <ngb-carousel> and <slide>:

<ngb-carousel *ngIf="images">

    <ng-template ngbSlide>

      <div class="picsum-img-wrapper">

    
    <img [src]="images[0]" alt="Random first slide">

      </div>

      <div class="carousel-caption">

    
    <h3>First slide label</h3>

    
    <p>Nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue mollis interdum.</p>

      </div>

    </ng-template>
</ngb-carousel>

If you are a big fan of Bootstrap while also enjoy the power and the performance that Angular offered, this could be a perfect choice of framework.

2. Angular Foundation

Another popular framework that has also been ported to use Angular is Foundation, and it is simply named “Angular Foundation”.

Similarly, this framework has modified Foundation components to adopt Angular’s directive and custom HTML elements so you can now build your web application using more semantically named HTML elements like <tabset> and <tab>, <accordion>, and <pagination>, rather than the ambiguous <div>. Here is one example of how we add an Alert component with the <alert> element:

<alert type="primary">

    <strong>This is a primary callout.</strong> This alert needs your attention, but it's not super important.
</alert>

If you like Foundation better than Bootstrap, then this is the framework to go with. You can get started with Angular Foundation in this page, or stay up-to-date with the project development through the Github repo.

3. Ionic Framework

Ionic comes with a handful of solid building-blocks that makes developing mobile applications easy and fast. Each component in the Ionic framework is optimized for mobile experience, which is basically dependent on touch and gestures. These UI components are also made up of custom HTML elements. In deploying a tabbed navigation, for example, you would use the <ion-tabs>:

<ion-tabs>

    <ion-tab-bar slot="bottom">

    <ion-tab-button tab="schedule">

    <ion-icon name="calendar"></ion-icon>

    <ion-label>Schedule</ion-label>

    <ion-badge>6</ion-badge>

    </ion-tab-button>

    

    <ion-tab-button tab="speakers">

    <ion-icon name="person-circle"></ion-icon>

    <ion-label>Speakers</ion-label>

    </ion-tab-button>

    

    <ion-tab-button tab="map">

    <ion-icon name="map"></ion-icon>

    <ion-label>Map</ion-label>

    </ion-tab-button>

    

    <ion-tab-button tab="about">

    <ion-icon name="information-circle"></ion-icon>

    <ion-label>About</ion-label>

    </ion-tab-button>

    </ion-tab-bar>
</ion-tabs>

To make it even easier and faster to build your application, you can use Ionic Creator which lets you build your app by drag-n-drop. So if performance and speed is important to you, Ionic is the best framework to go with.

4. NativeScript + Angular

NativeScript is a framework to create web and mobile application with JavaScript, and although it does not require Angular, you can integrate it with Angular so you can fully reuse your Angular skills and code to build beautiful application.

It comes with a full set of custom components to create a usable application such as the Buttons, Date Pickers, and Slider.

<Slider value="10" minValue="0" maxValue="100" backgroundColor="green" color="red"></Slider>

You can get started with the framework NativeScript + Anguular here

5. Nebular

Nebular is a set of UI components based on the Ava design system. It consists of more than 35 of reusable UI components such as the Card, Accordion, and Tabs. It also includes 400 icons, themes including the “dark mode” which can be easily customised to meet your design needs.

Each of the component is prefixed with the nb-. For example, you can add <nb-card> to create the Card component.

<nb-card>
<nb-card-body>Card</nb-card-body>
</nb-card>

On top of these components, Nebular also comes with a couple of authentication and security modules that you can easily install with NPM. This allows you to create, not only the UIs, but a working web application with a beautiful consisten UI quickly all in this single framework.

Bootstrap

Angular Bootstrap, as the name implies, is built on top one of the most popular front-end frameworks, Bootstrap. This framework contains a set of Bootstrap components such as Carousel, Alert, and Collapse along with some additions, like Rating and TimePicker.

All these components have been ported to use Angular directives and custom HTML elements. For example, rather than using a <div> to wrap the Carousel, you can use a more “meaningful” custom element, <ngb-carousel> and <slide>:

<ngb-carousel *ngIf="images">

    <ng-template ngbSlide>

      <div class="picsum-img-wrapper">

    
    <img [src]="images[0]" alt="Random first slide">

      </div>

      <div class="carousel-caption">

    
    <h3>First slide label</h3>

    
    <p>Nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue mollis interdum.</p>

      </div>

    </ng-template>
</ngb-carousel>

If you are a big fan of Bootstrap while also enjoy the power and the performance that Angular offered, this could be a perfect choice of framework.

2. Angular Foundation

Another popular framework that has also been ported to use Angular is Foundation, and it is simply named “Angular Foundation”.

Similarly, this framework has modified Foundation components to adopt Angular’s directive and custom HTML elements so you can now build your web application using more semantically named HTML elements like <tabset> and <tab>, <accordion>, and <pagination>, rather than the ambiguous <div>. Here is one example of how we add an Alert component with the <alert> element:

<alert type="primary">

    <strong>This is a primary callout.</strong> This alert needs your attention, but it's not super important.
</alert>

If you like Foundation better than Bootstrap, then this is the framework to go with. You can get started with Angular Foundation in this page, or stay up-to-date with the project development through the Github repo.

3. Ionic Framework

Ionic comes with a handful of solid building-blocks that makes developing mobile applications easy and fast. Each component in the Ionic framework is optimized for mobile experience, which is basically dependent on touch and gestures. These UI components are also made up of custom HTML elements. In deploying a tabbed navigation, for example, you would use the <ion-tabs>:

<ion-tabs>

    <ion-tab-bar slot="bottom">

    <ion-tab-button tab="schedule">

    <ion-icon name="calendar"></ion-icon>

    <ion-label>Schedule</ion-label>

    <ion-badge>6</ion-badge>

    </ion-tab-button>

    

    <ion-tab-button tab="speakers">

    <ion-icon name="person-circle"></ion-icon>

    <ion-label>Speakers</ion-label>

    </ion-tab-button>

    

    <ion-tab-button tab="map">

    <ion-icon name="map"></ion-icon>

    <ion-label>Map</ion-label>

    </ion-tab-button>

    

    <ion-tab-button tab="about">

    <ion-icon name="information-circle"></ion-icon>

    <ion-label>About</ion-label>

    </ion-tab-button>

    </ion-tab-bar>
</ion-tabs>

To make it even easier and faster to build your application, you can use Ionic Creator which lets you build your app by drag-n-drop. So if performance and speed is important to you, Ionic is the best framework to go with.

4. NativeScript + Angular

NativeScript is a framework to create web and mobile application with JavaScript, and although it does not require Angular, you can integrate it with Angular so you can fully reuse your Angular skills and code to build beautiful application.

It comes with a full set of custom components to create a usable application such as the Buttons, Date Pickers, and Slider.

<Slider value="10" minValue="0" maxValue="100" backgroundColor="green" color="red"></Slider>

You can get started with the framework NativeScript + Anguular here

5. Nebular

Nebular is a set of UI components based on the Ava design system. It consists of more than 35 of reusable UI components such as the Card, Accordion, and Tabs. It also includes 400 icons, themes including the “dark mode” which can be easily customised to meet your design needs.

Each of the component is prefixed with the nb-. For example, you can add <nb-card> to create the Card component.

<nb-card>
<nb-card-body>Card</nb-card-body>
</nb-card>

On top of these components, Nebular also comes with a couple of authentication and security modules that you can easily install with NPM. This allows you to create, not only the UIs, but a working web application with a beautiful consisten UI quickly all in this single framework.

The post 5 Angular Frameworks to Get Apps Up and Running Quickly appeared first on Hongkiat.