While many designers use lorem ipsum as the filler text for their projects, many others choose alternatives (check a previous WRD post for lorem ipsum alternatives).

Picksum Ipsum is another dummy text generator that is pretty original and fun.

It has a database of lines from 4  Hollywood legends: Client Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Jim Carrey.

We can choose the number of paragraphs and if <p> tags are needed or not. Also, a “rumble” option exists for creating a mixed filler text from 2 of the selected artists.

Hitch is a lightweight JavaScript library that adds expressive capabilities to CSS files.

It has some of the powers of CSS preprocessors like prefixing or variables but also some other stuff.

The library comes with multiple ready-to-use selectors like “anyof, allof, has..” and allows us to define any new ones (called hitches).

These hitches are simple JavaScript functions and can be written easily (once the library has more users, there will probably be many hitches around)

Hitch is very well-documented, has examples and it works on all modern browsers..

With icon-fonts, it became clear that, soon, we’ll no longer be using any images for icons.

Cikonss is a one more step further in icon usage as it uses no fonts but the items are created with pure CSS.

Currently, there are 40+ items in the set, they are responsive-layouts-friendly and work cross-browser (no CSS3 properties are used).

The set is currently not big enough to be used in web applications but if you need only few of them, than why not.

And, if the set keeps growing, it can become a valuable resource for the web design community.

Swiper is a beautiful content slider that is built for mobile and works pretty fast as it uses hardware accelerated transitions (if available).

The slider is lightweight, uses no JavaScript frameworks and has support for “touch events” whose interaction ratio can be customized.

It responds to changes in orientation, has support for vertical + horizontal sliding and comes with built-in pagination control (bullets).

Each swipe event brings the next/prev slide but it can be set in free mode as well where the content will be scrolled as much as you swiped.

Swiper can present multiple items at once (carousel), loop infinitely and feature any HTML content.

There is an API that allows controlling the pagination and provides callbacks on major events.

It also works on desktop browsers (mouse events are accepted) and can be extended with plugins.

When developing mobile (web) apps or responsive layouts, knowing the major screen-sizes and resolutions help a lot on deciding the dimensions for the layout.

Screensiz.es is a website that lists the important data about the screens of widely-used mobile + tablet screens and monitors.

It is possible to find the operating system used, physical size, resolution, PPI and pixel-density values.

Also, devices can be sorted by popularity which is a good way to decide which resolutions are your target.

Today, almost every web application uses charts to visualize data and provide as much information as possible with a user-friendly interface.

FusionCharts Suite XT is a professional (and paid) JavaScript chart library that enables us to create any type of charts.

It uses SVG and has support for 90+ chart types, including 3D, gantt, funnel, various gauges and even maps of world/continents/countries/states. Also, most of the charts have both 2D and 3D versions.

They are very easy-to-create and, optionally, an official jQuery plugin exists to simplify it more. Just define the chart type, insert the data and you are almost there.

Charts are completely customizable. The labels, fonts, colors, borders, etc. can all be changed.

And, they are heavily interactive with tooltips, clickable legend keys, drill-down, zooming/scrolling and one-click chart export or print.

Considering that the charts are rendered in SVG, they are compatible with any desktop or mobile browser including the old versions like IE6.

When building something complicated, besides the features, the support becomes important too. FusionCharts Suite XT is very well-documented, has an active community forum and comes with pro support.

The library has a detailed pricing structure that covers many use-cases like: commercial website, intranet, Saas app and more.

Pop Easy is a jQuery plugin for quickly creating completely customizable modals.

The plugin is lightweight (2kb) and has support for displaying any HTML element, including videos.

Regarding the design, the default modal already has a good-looking interface and it can be changed/improved with CSS.

There are options for customizing the animation used when the modal appears, its speed, the opacity, if it’ll be opened onLoad and more.

Considering the size, the plugin is very useful. One thing seems to be missing for now is the built-in ability to load remote data (Ajax).

Sticky menus are used widely as they help minimizing the need to scroll for reaching to the menu.

Smint is a jQuery plugin that can turn any given element into a sticky menu instantly.

Also, the plugin has support for smooth scrolling (which is usually used in one-page websites).

The plugin is almost plug ‘n’ play and the only customization provided is “scrolling speed”.

Converse.js is an open source chat application that can connect to any XMPP/Jabber server (like Google Talk,Skype, etc.).

It sits in the footer of web pages just like Facebook-chat and has support for one-to-one or multi-user conversations.

Contact requests can be accepted/declined, statuses can be set (online, away..) and there are “typing” notifications to inform the “listening” users.

With a little custom coding, single-site login can be accomplished (users logged in to the site will automatically be logged in to the chat).

Also, Converse.js doesn’t use any server-side code and it is totally built with JavaScript.

Unicode characters, the encoded strings to represent almost any character in any language, have an important place in web design and development.

Unicode-Table is a website providing a great unicode character table that lists unicode numbers and HTML codes of any character.

Characters can be sorted as categories and a search exists for locating them easily.

Also, the website has an encode and decoder for converting any text.