PeoplePods is an open source toolkit built with PHP/MySQL for creating websites with social networking capabilities with ease.

It can be used to build stand-alone sites or layered onto existing sites for adding social functionality.

It has the popular social functionality such as:

• friend lists
• personalized content views
• bookmarking
• voting, etc.

and standard web application features like:

• log-in
• personalization
• content creation and management
• & more

The toolkit is object-oriented & comes in 3 pieces: the core, plugin modules & administrative tools.

PeoplePods has support for theming & can be improved further easily with its plugins module.

For a web application, It is always a good idea to provide access to it from other platforms like mobile or desktop programs.

As web designers/developers, desktop applications are harder to create considering they have a totally different environment.

In order to fill this gap, we can make use of site-specific browsers which enable us to lock a website inside an application-looking browser that can interact with the system tray/dock & display notifications.

Some usage examples for site-specific browsers:

• displaying new orders, support tickets for an e-commerce website
• showing system tray alerts when a new visitor visits your website
• or even locking your whole application inside a site-specific browser and offering it as a desktop application.

To sum up, they simply help us convert a website into a desktop application. Here are free & mature tools for creating site-specific browsers:

Mozilla Prism (Win-Mac)

Prism is a very easy-to-customize tool that supports Windows & Mac.

Applications created can be:

• minimized to system tray/dock & a navigation can be added there
• set to display status messages & popups in the system tray/dock

Prism apps. will be running seperately from the browser & will stay alive even if the browser isn't.

P.S. You can also read a more detailed post about Prism at WRD.

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dynaTrace AJAX Edition is a free tool for diagnosing & preventing Ajax performance issues.

The tool runs on IE & measures the performance of your AJAX application as real users are feeling it.

It traces & analyzes AJAX calls through their entire round trip (DOM event, JavaScript, HTTP request, avaScript callback) and displays network traffic, CPU load, execution times & more.

dynaTrace AJAX also records every session for future offline analysis.

jParse is a jQuery plugin for parsing XML that was fetched with the jQuery .ajax method.

It can select the value of any XML node or a node's parameter & can ouput a totally customized HTML.

The plugin is very flexible & offers features like:

• running callback functions before it starts & after it finishes
• limitting the number of <items> to be processed
• excluding XML nodes with certain words, numbers or symbols
• output the number of <item>'s in a feed anywhere in your document

As jQuery .ajax method does not allow cross domain Ajax requests, the XML must be on the same domain.

To see how easy it is to parse a XML file with jParse, check the demo.

Browser Sandbox is an online platform which makes launching various browser versions possible.

It requires an installation of a plugin & can run:

• IE6-7-8
• Firefox 2-3-3.5
• Apple Safari 3-4
• Opera 9-10
• Google Chrome

The platform is definitely a gold mine for making cross-browser tests quickly & easily.

P.S. Spoon allows you to convert your own apps to Spoon apps & post them on the web. You can check the platform's homepage for that.

Many PHP developers use print_r() & var_dump() for debugging which output hard to read/unformatted results.

Krumo is a replacement for these functions which can display structured information about any PHP variable.

Once Krumo is ran, the output is displayed in a collapsible DHTML tree built around the structure of the dumped PHP variable.

Also, it speeds up the debugging process by the ability of turning it "off" rather than disabling every dumping route inside the code.

Krumo runs on PHP 5 & to see how useful it can be, check the examples.

Closure Tools is set of opensource (release info) developer tools by Google which are used while building Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs  & many others.

The tools include a JavaScript compiler, library & templating system.

JavaScript Compiler

It compiles JavaScript into compact, high-performance code. The compiler removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what's left so that it downloads and runs quickly.

It also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about common JavaScript pitfalls.

The compiler also offers a Firebug extension, named Inspector, for better debugging.

Closure Library

It is a broad, well-tested, modular, & cross-browser JavaScript library.

Only what you need can be pulled from a large set of reusable UI widgets, controls, lower-level utilities for DOM manipulation, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, & more.

Closure Templates

They simplifty the task of dynamically generating HTML.

In contrast to traditional templating systems, in which you use one big template per page, you can think of Closure Templates as small components that you compose to form your user interface.

Adobe AIR applications are great considering the ease-of-use & simplicity they offer.

Almost regulary, WRD is sharing the fresh Adobe AIR applications that web designers & developers will find useful, like:

• 15 New Adobe AIR Applications For Designers & Developers
  
• 16 Fresh Adobe AIR Applications For Designers & Developers
  
• 27 Adobe AIR Applications – Handy For Web Designers
  

Since then, new applications are created & ready to use. And, here they are:

Image Editing, Debugging & Invoicing

zFlick

This is an awesome Flickr search tool that makes browsing between images fun.

Once you find what you're looking for, just drag'n drop that image to your desktop to download it.

PixelWindow

It helps measuring the width/height of any item on the desktop. With a semi-transparent background & custom-presets, it is a great helper when prototyping websites.

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FireQuery is a Firefox add-on that extends Firebug with new jQuery-focused features.

It adds extra functions to the HTML tab like showing embedded data elements & event handlers inserted using jQuery.

All the jQuery expressions are presented in Firebug Console + DOM inspector and elements in jQuery collections are highlighted on hover.

Also, the jQueryify bookmarklet is integrated into FireQuery which makes injecting jQuery into any website possible.

Mu is a JavaScript library for enabling Facebook Connect on any website with ease.

It makes accessing the following possible:

• Identity: the user's name, photo and more
• Social Graph: the user's friends and connections
• Distribution: the Stream, and the ability to communicate
• Integration: publishers, canvas pages, profile boxes & tabs

Mu is lightweight can be used with other libraries with no conflicts.

There is also a console provided for experimenting the Mu APIs.