Microsoft is on a roll this month. TouchDevelop enables beginners as well as experienced programmers to create apps using their phone, tablet or a desktop environment. You can choose from one of three skill levels ranging from beginner, which provides a drag-and-drop interface for app development, up to expert, which provides more powerful features for programmers.
It's designed to tempt people into learning to code by making their first steps into app development easy, and interactive tutorials are provided to smooth the transition from dragging and dropping into writing code. Like Visual Studio Code, this is a cross-platform offering that works on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, Linux and Mac.
ES Feature Tests enables you to determine the best code to deliver to each browser so you can load native ES6+ code in ES6+ compliant browsers, and transpiled code in older browsers. Instead of using caniuse data for this purpose, this method performs feature tests for each browser – which is likely to be more reliable.
Remotely test and debug your JavaScript with this tool powered by node.js and socket.io. You can connect remotely to up to 50 devices simultaneously and run your code on all of them to test performance and fix errors. It's a way to debug your code on nearly any platform, and it's open source and free to use. There are also plugins for adding extra features.
It's been around for a while in beta form, but this month the Ionic Framework went official with the final release of Ionic 1.0.0 'uranium-unicorn'. Ionic is a free and open source SDK for building hybrid mobile apps with AngularJS. It offers mobile-optimised components and is designed with performance in mind. If you're used to using native SDKs it should hopefully be fairly familiar to you as it's been designed to work in a similar way.
If you have a ton of local fonts to deal with on your machine, this handy app for OS X might be useful. RightFont gives you fine control over your fonts, providing access right from the menu bar and integrating with both Photoshop and Sketch 3. Fonts can be organised according to whether they're TypeKit or Google, serif or sans serif, width, weight and more.
Daily design news, reviews, how-tos and more, as picked by the editors.
Tanya Combrinck has been writing about the web for over four years, and the internet is actually her preferred method of interacting with humanity. You can find her on Twitter at @tanyacombrinck.
