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.

We use labels on many parts of web design like providing information about images, form elements, videos..

Label.css is a simple-yet-useful set of CSS rules that provide a global label usage.

Each label can be attached to any element, positioned how we want (right, left, top, bottom, inside, outside) and can be animated with float or fade effects.

It works by adding pre-defined classes to the elements and the content of the labels are stored inside the data-label attributes of each element.

Simply, a good addition to any stylesheet (or CSS framework).

Skel.js is a tiny JavaScript framework (~6kb gzipped and minified) that simplifies building responsive layouts very much.

It has a JavaScript-powered and 12-column grid system that can handle any type of complex layouts + has easy-to-understand rules.

Managing breakpoints is just about adding the width ranges in the options of the skel.js‘ main function.

There is a plugin system for extending it further (a UI plugin is mentioned to be released soon).

Also, many helpful options exist like the ability to applying reset.css or normalize.css and defining the box model instantly.

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.

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.

For any dynamic website, if it is not the performance of the network/server, database queries are usually the source of performance issues.

They should be optimized for sure and minimized with the help of caching.

phpFastCache is an open source PHP caching library that comes as a single-file and can be integrated so quickly.

It has support for multiple caching methods (apc, memcache, memcached, wincache, files, pdo and mpdo), the period of caching can be defined and has a very simplified API.

Drawing anything using modern web technologies is possible, however, the default APIs are not that user-friendly.

Two.js is an exciting JavaScript library that provides a 2-dimensional and single drawing API for SVG, Canvas And WebGL.

The library has only (currently) support for shapes (no text or images) and allows importing SVG data.

It can group multiple elements which is useful when transforming them together.

There is a built-in animation loop, methods to draw well-known shapes and lots of options to customize them.