When building and updating native mobile apps, testing them can be a pain as this may require including an SDK or recompiling the app.

Appium is an open source framework which helps automating mobile app testing from any language and any test framework, with full access to back-end APIs and DBs from test code.

It works for both iOS + Android apps and tests can be written with Java, Objective-C, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, C#, Clojure, or Perl.

The framework is Mac OS X only and requires Nodejs to run.

HTML5 Up! is a website that creates and shares very good-looking and free HTML5-CSS3 templates.

All the templates have responsive layouts (down to mobile) (uses Skel.js) and they are compatible with all major browsers.

There are already 10+ templates where new ones are added within time and they can be used freely under the CCA license for both personal or commercial projects.

When working with JSON strings, it is usually hard too understand their hierarchy at the first look.

JSONmate is a web app that can beautify (and uglify) JSON strings where these strings can be directly pasted or loaded from a  remote URL.

Also, it has a very nice visual editor for customizing the data and a visualizer that provides a different view for it.

JSONmate has support for JSONP too and it is an open source project.

Users with modern browsers are increasing each day and making use of features like HTML5 audio sounds more and more logical.

AudioPlayer.js is a jQuery plugin for quickly placing a HTML5-powered audio player to any web page.

The player’s interface is chic (doesn’t use any images for that), has a responsive layout and touch support.

It has the major controls (play/pause, volume and duration) and weights only 4kb.

phpFreeChat is a free and open source PHP chat application that doesn’t require any database to run but rather uses the filesystem for it.

It can be used at the same time by any number of users, has a responsive layout that works in mobile too and has a modular authentication system which can be integrated into any app.

The application has 2 parts:

• server: a PHP-powered engine that accepts REST commands and handles the chat logic
• client: a jQuery plugin that communicates with the server and displays the chat interface

phpFreeChat is pretty simple in functionality yet support for multiple rooms, smileys and a “new message notification” will be added soon.

Lately, I was in a search for a jQuery range slider, jQuery UI’s slider widget was the first that I thought of.

It had all the features I needed: working as a single or range slider, default values and man/maxvalues. However, the smallest download size for it was still ~40kb. Too much for a slider.

Tried many others, they were good but almost each of them was missing a feature I needed (that you may not need).

And I found noUiSlider. It had all the things I was looking for and with a size of 2.7kb.

There is support for single or double handles, custom starting values, vertical/horizontal orientation and the ability to get /set values.

Also, it works on touch devices and can be customized with CSS completely. Just a perfect widget for any UI.

Chartkick is a Ruby gem (also has a JavaScript API which doesn’t require Ruby) for creating good-looking charts very easily and quickly.

It integrates with 2 charting libraries: Highcharts and Google Charts where it is possible to use the same functions for generating charts with each library.

There is support for multiple chart types and multiple series in a single chart.

And, like mentioned there is also Chartkick.js which brings the same functionality to the client-side, without Ruby.

Windows is a lightweight jQuery plugin for nicely scrolling the full-screen.

It provides a simple and handy API for managing the page/content position to ease the browsing experience.

The plugin can analyze if a defined content is in the viewport, how much of it is in the viewport and can trigger any actions like focusing the page to the content by scrolling it.

When building any map-related applications, there are many popular providers to select from like Google Maps or Bing Maps and they provide APIs for integration.

However, using an open source engine and the ability to switch providers anytime offers more freedom + flexibility.

Cesium, a WebGL-powered JavaScript mapping library, offers just that by being provider-agnostic.

It has support for 3 different views: 3D globe, 2D map, and 2.5D Columbus View where transitioning from one to another is just a line of code.

Drawing any type of shapes, highlighting specific regions and interacting with the map using mouse or touch is pretty easy.

Cesium comes as a single JS file and work in all major browsers including mobile.

It is so good that the web gets more and more lightweight with the use of modern web technologies.

Few days ago, WRD had shared the pure CSS gallery and now CSS Modal, a solution to create modal boxes with CSS.

They can be used to display any HTML content and designed to work in responsive layouts.

JavaScript is used only for improving the experience (Esc key support, firing events..) and it is also available as a SASS plugin.